Where is the Burgess Shale?: Fossils and Deep Geologic Spacetime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article explores the concept of “place” through Deep Time using fossil discoveries from the Burgess Shale, a 508-million-year-old fossil site which preserves some of the earliest lifeforms on Earth. I apply a performative analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews and to ethnographic data collected on hikes to the shale; at museum exhibits, paleontological symposia, and conferences; and at two major North American paleontological collections. A performative analysis of place uncovers how places are always made and remade in actions upon and through materializing bodies and nonhuman entities. The present article addresses doings and makings of place through Deep Time, or vast passages of time that are unintelligibly long to humans. Place is not just a spatial and cultural concept, but also a temporal one, and the timeline is nonlinear. I argue that fossils contribute to the relativity, contested nature, and multi-synchronicity of place. With a focus on “place-making,” I argue that the shale is a process which never attains a fixity or finality to its meaning, but is rather negotiated and often, a site of struggle. As time-travellers from Deep Time, fossils are strictly traces of ancient critters and environments, so their meaning is contingent upon social, cultural, historical, and political conditions under which they are interpreted. Fossils are therefore sources of resistance on a changing and maybe-dying planet.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".