Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bulla, David W., and Gregory A. Borchard. Journalism in the Civil War Era. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 256 pp. $89.95. Because the Civil War was the worst event in American history, resulting in more than 600,000 military deaths, one would expect library shelves to be filled with books on how the war was covered by the press. They are not. In fact, there are only a handful of books dealing with the press and the war as a whole, and fewer are considered definitive works. For that reason, any new entry into the field of Civil War journalism history is met with much anticipation. It is indeed good news if a new book makes a significant contribution to the field. Journalism in the Civil War by David W. Bulla and Gregory A. Borchard is just that. It is organized into disparate chapters each dealing with a specific theme. This is not a book to be picked up and read from start to finish; the reader should not expect a seamless progression. Rather, it can be used to find information on specific topics, making it a resource that will be held on to and kept close at hand for many years. All of the chapters are important and interesting to the journalism history researcher, and several make a significant contribution to the field. Much has been written about Horace Greeley, but seldom has his work been brought together in such an enlightening narrative as in chapter three, Bully Pulpit: Horace Greeley's New York Tribune!' The authors delve into his personality and belief system and put into context his relationship with Abraham Lincoln. The authors also shed light on his editorial, Prayer of Twenty Millions, by examining where it came from and what it meant. They demonstrate that his participation in the failed 1 864 peace mediation in Canada, designed by Lincoln to calm Greeley's rhetoric, made him even more convinced that he alone had the solution to the protracted war, which led to even more feuding with the president that is expertly described by the authors. The reader comes away with a deeper understanding of the influential and often conflicted editor. Journalism historians have often pondered whether readership demands or technological change are the primary drivers in shifts in news delivery models. The major technological developments affecting journalism during the Civil War period are dealt with in chapter five, Journalistic Practice and Technological Change. This chapter alone would classify this book as a major contribution to the understanding of Civil War journalism. …
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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 | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.011 |
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".