In the Company of Caterpillars: Lessons on Language and Life from Insects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This sandwich thesis takes another species—fall webworm caterpillars—as a guide and teacher, and it follows the critical questions that emerged from my relationship with these creatures and my analysis of local texts that reference them and their lifeways. Thus, the research questions explored here are defined by another creature’s influence and entanglements. Webworm caterpillars’ relationship to diction and storytelling are particularly prominent in this work, though it also engages with the caterpillars’ relationship to western science and popular culture. This research is arranged into three parts or research papers. The first considers how non-human communities are named; it investigates the word “colony” in relation to social insects. After critically examining some of this word’s connections to colonial geographies and evolutionary biology, it suggests that readers refrain from casually referring to insect collectives as “colonies.” The second paper focuses on the feeling of disgust and the supposed disposability of insect lives. It also analyses how some conservation groups have approached disgust in the past, and it encourages readers to lean into their uncomfortable feelings as they build relationships with other creatures. The third paper looks at the practices of reading and writing, and it acknowledges that our definitions of these terms have often been entangled with humancentric and Eurocentric worldviews. In an effort to reimagine cross-species relationships in a way that encourages peace and respect, this paper invites readers to broaden their understanding of literary practices to include non-human traces. Collectively, these papers represent an effort to learn from another species, an imperative echoed across the Environmental Humanities and Animal Studies, and one which requires me to grapple with my position as a settler scholar. It thus opens critical questions about how oft-reviled creatures are narrated across communities, and it encourages readers to engage in more respectful storytelling practices.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".