“From an STS perspective”: An analysis of a recurring phrase in academic writing about science, technology, and society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a vast, interdisciplinary playground that invites diverse explorations of science, technology, and society relations. Despite this vastness, numerous authors in STS use a single phrase – “From an STS perspective” – when writing for peers and broader audiences. To claim “an STS perspective” suggests that there is some specific coherent, cohesive, and delineating perspective within STS. This claim seems to clash with the ideals of openness and multiplicity, which are taken as being central to STS scholarship. Taking this tension between singularity and plurality as its entry point, this paper examines how STS scholars recurrently use the term “STS perspective” in STS journal articles, STS handbooks, and STS conference abstracts over the past ten years. It considers two questions: 1) Does a close examination of the phrase give us a better sense of what STS means to STS scholars? 2) What does the phrase accomplish rhetorically, for instance in terms of signaling membership of a research community? The paper seeks to sensitize STS researchers to how they draw intellectual boundaries around STS and the rhetorical moves they make as scholars and writers – whether deliberately or inadvertently. It argues that the phrase “From an STS perspective” and variations of it, can be enabling of different articulations of STS. However, such phrases become meaningless tropes that risk excluding various perspectives (both STS and non-STS) from the conversation if its authors do not give some indication of what they mean.
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 | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".