MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2017305395 · doi:10.1177/1750635210360083

The Nigerian civil war and its media: groping for clues

2010· article· en· W2017305395 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Françoise Ugochukwu

Bibliographic record

VenueMedia War & Conflict · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican history and culture studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSurrenderSpanish Civil WarPoliticsBattleIndependence (probability theory)Political scienceMedia studiesLawHistoryEconomic historySociologyAncient history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Following months of political instability in Nigeria and the massacres of Igbo people in the north of the country during the summer and fall of 1966, the situation deteriorated rapidly. On 30 May 1967, the Eastern Region (Igboland) unilaterally declared its independence, triggering a civil war that, coupled with a tight economic blockade of the secessionist region and the logistic support of foreign powers, turned into a three-year conflict that claimed over three million lives. Nigerian and Biafran troops were engaged in battle from 6 July 1967 until 12 January 1970, when the war ended with Biafra’s surrender. All through the conflict, but especially from 1968—9, the world media converged on Nigeria, trying their best to cover the conflict for their audiences, with mixed fortunes. This study, based on radio bulletins gathered daily in France from 1968 to 1970 from the BBC World Service, Voice of America, France-Inter, Radio-France International, Europe n.1, Radio-Brussels, Radio-Lausanne and Radio-Canada, reveals the way the media groped their way through a flurry of contradicting nuggets of information in a desperate hunt for the truth on a far-away nightmare, with unreliable sources contributing to the confusion and a proliferation of unreliable pieces of news. In spite of these limitations, the media succeeded in covering the progress on the ground, the unfolding of the humanitarian situation and mounting casualties, the arms race and the political scene, and eventually achieved their aim — that of attracting the world’s attention to Nigeria.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.011
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.016

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.011
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0080.006
Science and technology studies0.0070.005
Scholarly communication0.0160.012
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.285
Teacher spread0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations11
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueMedia War & ConflictSame topicAfrican history and culture studiesFrench-language works237,207