Audibility in the Archive: Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s Poetry for Radio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Back in the mid-nineties, my line manager, an archivist at the Film and Sound Library at BBC Wales told me an anecdote. Some years before, the entire archive had to be reorganised, material was to be culled, space on the Cardiff campus had become a premium. These were the days of quarter inch audiotape and editing by razorblade. Recorded sound was still a physical object, preserved in cardboard boxes, catalogued by year, week and programme number. The refurbishment contract necessitated a quick turnaround, which meant that radio producers were under pressure to authorise what materials they wanted kept. A skip had been brought to the back of the archive, and was filling fast. Alarmed by the mini mountain of white boxes that were massing, one evening my boss took a stepladder and climbed into the skip to sift through the reels. Programmes in both Welsh and English were rescued. Some were archived as compilation tapes under the acronym WAL (Wales Audio Library).
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".