Reclaiming the ancestral past: narrative, rhetoric and the ‘convict stain’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports the arguments used by members of two convictdescendant societies in embracing their convict ancestry. The data are taken from interviews that I conducted in 1999. In the main, respondents were involved in genealogy prior to discovering their or their spouses' convict ancestry. Respondents effectively countered ancestral stigma by making two kinds of argument. In the first, they recast ancestral convicts as: objects of quasi-professional interest; nation-builders; a minority within a multicultural society; collectibles; and embodying ‘interesting stories’. The second type of argument forwarded more particularized treatments of convict ancestors by: minimizing the gravity of their offences; temporally distancing descendants from them; empathizing with them; and claiming their redemption. I offer some concluding thoughts on the sociology of memory and the place of genealogical memory workers within the family.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it