The Ethnography of the Digital World, or How to Do Fieldwork in a “Brave New World”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is the world digital?(Simon 2000) "Speed" is one of the first words people tend to use when they describe the Internet.A well-known French politician Alain Madelin recently echoed this consensus view when he said that electronic communications had brought about a "new world where it is no longer the big who triumph over the small, but the fast over the slow" {Le Monde, July 2-3, 2000).Several years earlier, Paul Virilio (1993) wrote, "The reality of information lies entirely in its speed of propagation."If so, Digital man, Negroponte's (1995) successor to Homo sapiens sapiens, would be distinguished primarily by the speed with which he processed information, not by the content of what he processed.Natural sélection, operating to the advantage of the swift, is, according to this logic, in the midst of creating a new species whose new, true, name will be Einstein's famous formula, E=mc2.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".