The Age of Experience: pragmatism, the<i>Titanic</i>and<i>The Reef</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the H. M. S. Titanic , making her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York, struck an iceberg 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, taking 1,503 people to their deaths in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic (Biel 21). Edith Wharton was in the midst of writing a new novel, The Reef . She devoted the lion's share of that spring and summer to completing the manuscript. She paused long enough that July, however, to accompany Henry James to Cliveden, the expansive Buckinghamshire estate of Waldorf and Nancy Astor. There, they met 19-year-old Madeline Astor, a Titanic survivor and recent widow whose husband, John Jacob Astor IV, had famously gone down with the doomed vessel. Although we do not have a record of what the Cliveden party discussed, it is certain that the recent disaster was on everyone's mind. Indeed, a number of Wharton's close friends were deeply distressed. James, for one, wrote to Mrs. Francis D. Millet to express his condolences for the death of her husband “in the midst of all the horrors and misery” (H. James, Letters 613). Elizabeth Cameron, a Paris hostess, told Wharton that she had received several worrisome letters from Henry Adams, who – as fate would have it – had booked passage aboard the ship's anticipated return voyage to Europe. “This Titanic blow shatters one's nerves,” Adams had written. “We can't grapple it” (Adams, Letters 535).
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".