The Megaphone as Material Culture:: Design, Use and Symbolism in North American Society, 1878-1980
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the ways in which the megaphone was utilized as an object of communication and as a semiotic cultural symbol in North America between the late 19th and late 20th century. Through this analysis, it argues that a correlation can be established between technological modifications to the megaphone and pronounced changes in its users, use and cultural meaning over time. Equipped with limited communicative capabilities, the original, vintage megaphone occupied a prominent role in the patriarchal power structure and culture of leisure of the Victorian era as a gendered and exclusive instrument that accorded knowledge and stature to its primarily male users. This association with power and privilege, however, grew more tenuous by the early-post-war era. In response to dramatic advances in design and technology and in conjunction with growing societal polarization, the modern successor to the original megaphone became ascribed with new cultural meanings antithetical to the Victorian era, and evolved into a polarizing cultural symbol as a politicized and democratized object utilized by a diverse set of social actors to both enforce and contest the status quo.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".