The Disciplinary Value of Linguistic Capital in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between linguistic practices and funding success in Canadian social sciences and humanities. Through a mixed-methods approach combining data on 56,680 successful and unsuccessful grant applications submitted to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and 45 interviews with past members of review committees, we analyse how language intersects with knowledge hierarchies and disciplinary cultures. Our findings show that writing a grant proposal in English rather than in French is associated with slightly higher chances of securing funding, mostly reflecting the greater recognition of applicants who have published in prestigious anglophone journals. However, the worth of this linguistic capital varies significantly across disciplines. These differences stem from how each discipline defines scientific value—whether through a more universal or context-dependent perspective and according to singular or plural hierarchies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.113 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".