Bibliographic record
Abstract
Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives. Edited by Joseph Sciorra (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+ 257, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, list of contributors, index. $85.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.)Italian Folk is an excellent collection of eleven essays (five new and six revised) edited by folklorist Joseph Sciorra. The editor, known for his active role at Calandra Italian American Institute at College, City University of New York, very successfully presented to general audience a wide spectrum of everyday life of Italian Americans. The editor invites us to listen with an accent seemingly imperceptible and often dismissed mundane activities of Italian Americans and, thus, understand better the variety of Italian-American vernacular expressivity (7).The reader will be satisfied, indeed, by interdisciplinary breadth of included essays. Topics such as food and family culture, vernacular architecture, folk art, residential landscaping, poetry, music, community festivals, religious fiestas, folk healing, and folk magic are discussed through lenses of various disciplines, such as folklore, anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, history of art, etc. The contributors use diverse methodologies, such as ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and personal accounts to describe and analyze Italian-American communities in North America, in national as well as transnational levels.Simone Cinotto speaks about food and family conflicts in Italian Harlem 1920-40. The author argues that Italian-American food culture was never a static tradition, but rather changed and evolved according to and financial needs of immigrants. John Allan Cicala, using a behavioral ethnographic approach, focuses on his grandmother and her family history to reveal social and aesthetic subtleties involved in preparation, presentation, and consumption of Sicilian cuscuszu dish (48). Lara Pascali studies postwar Italian houses in and around Toronto, Montreal, and New York. She analyzes cultural use of space, particularly use of basement kitchens as a liberating space which offers freedom of movement, usage, and ultimately, more comfort and peace of mind (61). In an article on folk art Kenneth Scambray focuses on two examples (Baldassare Forestiere's Underground Gardens and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers) to demonstrate these works express in their individual forms their dual impulse between recollections of Italy and a hope for success and settlement in America (64). Art historian Joseph Inguanti shows how Italian-American residential play a crucial role in constructing Italian-American ethnic identity (105). He categorizes them in two basic types: landscapes of order (small, neat, and intensely managed front yards of Italian Americans in Brooklyn and Queens (85), and landscapes of memory from Long Island and Connecticut (where ornamental horticulture and raising of food crops are equally important, 84). …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".