Parasitic and Symbiotic – The Ambivalence of Necessity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This issue of Semiotic Review began accidentally, when, in 2010, we began talking about the possibility of parasites and anthropology for the purpose of putting together a panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, it came out of mulling over the recent turn to "multispecies" anthropology, and reflecting on the role of Anthropology in the contemporary American university. Our interest at the time was to bring together anthropologists from across the field to consider parasites of all sorts: the organic and inorganic, the individual and institutional, the actual and the virtual. What our panelists – many of whom are represented in this issue of Semiotic Review – brought us were papers that did precisely that work, and much of their analyses were soundly within the tradition of semiotics, which opened up the possibility of translating that panel into this issue, and to open up the conversation to others interested in the parasite and its figurations. In this brief introduction, we review our thinking that led to the panel and eventually this issue, thinking that stems from trends in anthropology regarding multispecies analysis and the place of Anthropology more generally. We conclude by offering some suggestions on how parasites might help us thinking about societies, subjects and semiotics.
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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".