Texts and the Single Scholar: Is the Morning After Worth the Night Before?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conference presentation (HTML slide deck) delivered at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 8 May 2003, in Session 90, “Electronic Editions: The Evolution of the Text?” (The title slide of the deck reads “Text and the Single Scholar”; the talk is cited in the author's record as “Texts and the Single Scholar.”) Structural encoding systems such as the TEI offer editors a powerful tool for storing, processing, and presenting texts. Some of the most successful uses of this tool have been made by the editors of large corpora and texts with complex histories or visually interesting source material (e.g. the Brown Women Writers series, the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman Projects, the Electronic Beowulf). Most of these projects are of massive scope, involving teams of scholars, full-time technical staff, and relatively large budgets. This paper looks at the costs and opportunities of structural encoding and electronic editing from the opposite end of the scale — from the perspective of a single scholar engaged with minimal support in editing a moderately complex text or small-to-medium-sized corpus. Drawing on the author's experience with the recently completed Electronic Cædmon's Hymn, it argues that the intellectual and economic costs of an electronic approach are more significant than often realised, explores myths about the revolutionary character of electronic editions, and concludes by suggesting a model by which editors of smaller projects might pool resources. This record contains the original HTML slide deck (zipped) and a slide-by-slide PDF rendering. Slide 3 was a live demonstration of the Electronic Cædmon's Hymn edition (a separate work).
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.004 |
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".