Jamie L. Jones. <i>Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of an energy transition is a powerful and deceptively simple one that has captured the attention of energy and environmental historians writing amid climate crisis. The result has been a spate of excellent work on the economic, social, and political implications of the modern era’s major energy transition: the shift from a world defined by renewable flows of energy (muscle, sun, wind, and water) to one defined by the production and use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Many of these studies have offered nuanced accounts of transition, noting that it is always contested, uneven, and overlapping to such a degree that the term transition may not even be appropriate. But few scholars have approached the question in the compelling way that Jamie L. Jones does in Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling. Most accounts trace either the rise of new fuels or the persistence of old ones, but in this densely argued book, Jones focuses on a declining resource—whale oil—to explore the “cultural afterlife” of a fuel rapidly losing its original economic significance (5). The result is a history of energy that deepens our understanding of how energy transitions work culturally and politically. Jones’s overarching argument is that the representation, memory, and artifacts of US whaling helped mediate the nineteenth century’s bewildering transition to fossil fuels, functioning as a yardstick of modernity and a site of nostalgic longing for a fictive past that helped remake social and political life in the United States.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
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".