Africa’s Media: Democracy and the politics of belonging, by Francis Nyamnjoh. London and Pretoria, South Africa: Zed Press and UNISA Press, 2005. 308 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 1-84277-583-9 (paperback).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Africa joined the so-called Third Wave of Democracy in the 1990s, as mounting popular pressures forced authoritarian rulers to concede to the liberalization of politics. Two decades on, assessment of the continent’s tentative experiments in democratization is decidedly mixed, ranging from their cynical dismissal as (yet again) misadventures of societies whose fundamental pre-modern constitution renders them ill-equipped to form modern states (let alone democratic ones) to their representation as new departures on bumpy but irreversible journeys towards the consolidation of democratic nation-states. A more balanced evaluation will concede that much has changed and much remains the same. African societies as a whole are much freer today, even if these new freedoms have not been accompanied by an amelioration of the dire material conditions of the overwhelming numbers of their citizens. Even the most obdurate dictators now find it necessary to play the election game in order to legitimate their grip on power, but the old logics of competition and control of political power have altered little. Political liberalization has weakened states’ capacities for social regulation and given new lease to identity politics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.007 |
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".