Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter is a form of “creative non-fiction” or “creative criticism” that the author uses to illustrate the relationship between seriousness and ridiculousness in academic activity in the humanities. This is an account of an outrageous, deeply ludic but ultimately ethically and politically problematic academic paper, given at a conference that the author attended. The paper in question was one given by a Slovene Art Theorist (SAT) that explored the cultural and political dimensions of the contemporary migrant crisis in highly abstruse theoretical terms and that proposed as a response to this crisis a form of artistic activism that the SAT termed “porno-vandalism”. The author explores some of the historical background to the SAT’s paper, revealing that behind it (unacknowledged by the SAT) lies the true story of a group of Inuit who were brought to Europe at the end of the 19th Century by the pioneer of the modern zoological garden, Carl Hagenbeck, to be exhibited as “attractions”. Unearthing the tragic fate of these Inuit in a diary written by Abraham, their leader, the author probes the discrepancy between the excess and ridiculousness of the SAT’s high-theoretical art-performance and the real colonial violence towards extra-Europeans of which she chooses not to speak. The author also pays attention to the SAT’s audience, remarking on the extent to which performances like these often come to resemble a tired version of the tale of ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’: everyone knows that what is going on is absurd and obscene, but nobody is bothered enough to point this out. To make this point, he draws on a reading of a poem by Verlaine.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".