Everybody's Going: City Newspapers and the Early Mass Market for Movies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of the mass market as a concept ordering distinctions in urban space is investigated through newspaper reporting and promotion of early movie‐going in Toronto, 1907–1916. The analysis builds upon a revision of Chicago Sociology's text on The City, shifting the method and theoretical weight to rest more on Park's Natural History of the Newspaper than Burgess' Growth of the City. The metropolitan newspaper is both document and agent of urbanization, and is used here to describe how modernity was grounded in mass culture. The newspaper provides a sensible version of urban living for city dwellers, a map or menu of the city's rhythms and spaces. Specific to the movies, there is a shift from journalism to promotion, from trying to understand the audience to letting advertising for ever‐changing film titles stand in for the urban practice. In particular, the brief fad of serial films with accompanying stories in newspapers perhaps marks when a mass audience was first assumed. Serial films provided an umbrella text to explicitly show how the variety of spaces, times, prices, and classes of audiences encompassed a common practice, a mass practice.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".