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Record W4414110760 · doi:10.22148/001c.143993

Computation and Form, Reconsidered

2025· article· en· W4414110760 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Tess McNulty, Laura Alice Chapot

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Cultural Analytics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicDigital Humanities and Scholarship
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersDartmouth College
KeywordsGenerative grammarSketchComicsComputationPoetryKey (lock)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics have continually reconsidered the compatibility of computation and the humanities. Often, questions of “form” have played key roles in these conversations. In the 1940s, for example, critics asked whether word-counting might capture “formal units” of poetry like style. By the 2010s, scholars debated with new fervor whether computational methods could—or should—be used to track aesthetic structures like narrative, character, or genre, and especially without eliding rich socio-historical contexts. Today, these debates are by no means over. But they look different after a half decade of new work, and a cascade of theoretical and technical developments—perhaps most prominently, increasing attention to audiovisual materials and the explosion of transformer-based generative AI. In this special issue, we bring together scholars from across multiple disciplines to reconsider the intersections between computation and form for this emerging technological and critical moment. Together, their work represents a digital humanities in multiple types of transition. The essays collected in this issue refine existing computational critical methods to enable more nuanced and contextualized formal analysis; they apply these methods beyond literary or aesthetic canons to broader ranges of audiovisual, pop-cultural, and technical artifacts, from comics and conspiracy theories to viral TikToks; and they consider prompt-based LLMs, not only as new tools of aesthetic analysis, but also as cultural and technical “forms” in their own right. The articles in this special issue will be published in groups on a rolling basis over the coming weeks.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.018
Threshold uncertainty score0.059

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0050.078
Scholarly communication0.0180.025
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0030.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.073
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.207 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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