Review Essay We are Still Looking: Alexander Watson, Marginal Man, and the Continuing Search for the Hidden Innis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each and every time a new contribution devoted to the com-munication writings of Harold Innis emerges, it faces a cen-tral question: is it telling us something new? More to the point, is it telling us something of the “hidden Innis”? It is a truism in the literature that Innis, a political economist at the University of Toronto from 1920 to 1952, was an awful writer. It is also a truism, however, that Innis ’ writings on media and communi-cation technology contain more than they apparently let on. In Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis forwarded three important propositions about media: that their material properties engender a bias in cultures either toward the dimension of space or toward time; that communication technologies, over time, will lock communicants into one bias or another, a state that Innis referred to as the Monopoly of Knowledge; and that cultures, through default or design, can thwart the debilitating effects of media by actively constructing knowledge and contin-ually querying formulations already in circulation, an ethic Innis referred to as the Oral Tradition (Innis, 1950, 1951). These theories, in their turn, have provoked both admiration and upset. Critics have faulted Innis, particularly in his formulations on media, with for-warding simplistic notions that do violence to history. Defenders, in response, have set for themselves the task of refuting that charge. Their work has been guided by the premise that if Innis was capable of discerning new and important John M. Bonnett is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. He is a member of the
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.011 |
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".