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Record W4413346466 · doi:10.22148/001c.142979

The Eclectic Reader

2025· article· en· W4413346466 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
James J. English, Joanne S. Porter

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Cultural Analytics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSocial and Cultural Dynamics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer sciencePsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Eclecticism has been among the most central concerns in the sociology of cultural consumption for 30 years, but hardly any research has been done on the eclecticism of readers. We have been using data from Goodreads to address this blind spot. Our research enables us to describe some general patterns of breadth vs narrowness in the reading habits of highly active Goodreads users, which largely resemble the socially hierarchized schema of omnivore vs univore discerned by scholars in other fields of cultural practice. But our analysis also highlights the limitations of our model, and indeed of eclecticism itself, a concept rife with problems that have have often gone unremarked in the sociological literature. These problems involve the relationship of eclecticism to temporality; the slippages between preference (taste) and practice (habit); and the sheer variety of equally legitimate but incommensurate ways to classify works of literature and culture.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.684
Threshold uncertainty score0.774

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.354
Teacher spread0.328 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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