"As the Locusts in Egypt Gathered Crops": Hooked Mat Mania and Cross-Border Shopping in the Early Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hooked mat, a domestic craft product originating in northeastern Canada and the United States in the mid-1800s, enjoyed a revival in the 1920s that journalists dubbed hook mat mania. In an expression of antimodernist sentiment, affluent urban Americans acquired handicrafts made by simple rural folk, eventually realizing large profits through resale when the mats gained mass popularity. This paper explores the impact of the mania on Nova Scotians from a social, cultural, and economic perspective. Collectors, dealers, and handicraft organizers transformed these domestic floorings into consumer commodities, severed from their primary function, social context, and provenance. Ironically, without outside attention, little record would remain of this craft tradition. Furthermore, the consumer impulse allowed rural women to contribute significantly to the family economy during hard times. Resume La carpette crochetee, produit domestique artisanal apparu dans le nord-est du Canada et des Etats-Unis au milieu du XXe siecle, a connu dans les annees 1920 un regain de popularite que les journalistes ont appele « folie des tapis au crochet ». Dans leur volonte d'exprimer leur antimodernisme, les citadins americains aises achetaient des produits artisanaux fabriques par les gens « simples » de la campagne et ont fait de gros benefices en revendant ces tapis quand ils sont devenus populaires. Cet article etudie les repercussions sociales, culturelles et economiques de cette «folie » sur les habitants de la Nouvelle-Ecosse. Collectionneurs, vendeurs et organisateurs d'expositions d'artisanat ont transforme ces couvre-sol d'usage domestique en produits de consommation n'ayant plus rien a voir avec leur fonction premiere, leur contexte social et leur provenance. Ironiquement, si le public ne s'etait pas interesse a cette tradition artisanale, il resterait peu d'information a son sujet. La demande a en outre permis aux campagnardes de contribuer de facon marquee a l'economie familiale en periode difficile.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".