The Imitation Game as a Method for Testing Producers and Their Audience, Real and Imagined: A Proof of Concept
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do producers know about their audiences, how do they know it, and how does this knowledge inform their output? Recent research has tackled these questions as they relate to journalists and social media users, but few studies have put their knowledge to the test, never mind with the audience’s help. This study does so by conceptualizing the producers’ orientation to, and tacit knowledge of their audiences, and by introducing the Imitation Game methodology to media and communication studies. It reports on a study that tested whether Radio-Canada producers could pass as members of their audience to actual members acting as judges. In 12 imitation games comprising dialogue around 63 questions, producers convincingly mimicked audience members on knowledge, preference, and biographical questions, and nearly so on opinion questions. Their critical reflections and plausible accounts of reception practice generally confounded judges across question types, thus demonstrating the method’s promise.
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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 | 0.068 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".