William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is an intimidating prospect to follow the late G. E. Bentley, Jr., in compiling even a portion of this year’s checklist. As readers of this journal well know, Bentley’s impact on the study of Blake was profound and places him in the lofty empyrean inhabited by Geoffrey Keynes, S. Foster Damon, Mona Wilson, Northrop Frye, and David V. Erdman. In the words of David Worrall, “As Bentley realized a long time ago, and the rest of us somewhat later, the study of Blake is a uniquely complex activity because the abundance, technical complexity and material diversity of Blake’s original artifacts is combined with a dearth of ‘literary’ information about his life.” In A Blake Bibliography (co-authored with Martin K. Nurmi), Blake Books, Blake Books Supplement, and “William Blake and His Circle,” Bentley brought bibliography on both Blake and scholarship about him to its present state of precision and comprehensiveness. In Blake Records, he provided scholars with an easy means of accessing all the materially known facts of Blake’s life and his contemporary reception. He edited important facsimiles that offered painstaking transcriptions of Tiriel and Vala, or The Four Zoas, and his William Blake’s Writings vied with Erdman’s Complete Poetry and Prose as the most authoritative letterpress edition of Blake’s literary works. His scholarship was frightfully prolific, even toward the end of his life, and it covered not only Blake but also a wide range of writers and publishers connected to him, including George Cumberland, the Edwardses of Halifax, and Thomas Macklin. The highest praise may be the simplest: G. E. Bentley, Jr., helped us understand Blake better.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.040 | 0.040 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.019 |
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".