Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Homer wrote about the siege of Troy, he was already part of tradition stretching back to the epic of Gilgamish that in its very representation explored the relation between poetry and history. Long before Aristotle would speculate on the connection among, and hierarchy of, history, poetry and philosophy, Homer was making his epic and representing some of the great themes: love and war, the clash between cultures. This division between East and West, ages before Orientalism, became a prominent trope even into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when Christian crusaders and the Ottoman soldiers fought for the Eastern Mediterranean, the cradle of both their civilizations. In addition to discussing the relation of poetry and history as well as Europe and its rivals, especially through warfare, this essay, while responding directly to recent scholarship in the field, will, in a more oblique way, elaborate on an image that struck me over again while a child and then in school and university — Achilles dragging Hector round the walls of Troy. This image involves a poetic and mythical representation of what appears to have been a historical event, a kind of synecdochic emblem of combat, especially between Europe and Asia, that translated into early modern Europe and was displaced in the conquest of the New World. The epic and the history play are genres that reshape history, and even romance explores the legendary and fictional aspects of the historical. The historical text and the world it describes and interprets are not identical no matter how mimetic or realistic history is thought to be. Like the epic poet or the historical dramatist, historians, at least since Herodotus, have had to select their evidence and their muthos— the shape of their narrative. This story-form had to have a beginning, middle and end: history as action and writing shares an open boundary between event and interpretation. Even in historical writing, though perhaps less so than in historical poetry, the quest for what happened
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".