Roland Barthes and the “beauty of speed”: sports as a Futurist myth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper deals with Roland Barthes’ interpretation of sports as a contemporary myth, becoming a semiotic and communicative medium with the approach of consumer society. In particular, the paper dwells on the transformation of motor racing into a collective myth, in accordance with Marinetti’s celebration of speed. The texts arranged by Barthes for the documentary directed by Aubert Aquin (Les sport et les hommes, 1960-1961) enable an analysis of the diffusion of sports as a mere collective business. Therefore, the paper revolves around Barthes’ ability to elaborate a theoretical framework suitable for the study of contemporary myths, in line with the Futurist “beauty of speed”. Juan Manuel Fangio embodied the real social myth, nowadays enhanced by Luis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel. The latter won the 2018 edition of the F1 Canadian Gp forty years after Gilles Villeneuve reached his first victory. The deaths of Villeneuve and Senna and Schumacher’s serious injury attest that speed has become an effective social myth, suspended between risks and immortality.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".