An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson's <i>Processional</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Howard Lawson's Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) was an experiment in putting mass cultural forms to leftist avant-garde uses. But as the play negotiates the conflict between two basic principles for organizing mass culture's stock materials – between vaudeville and the symphony – it stages a basic tension between an item-level approach to collecting “acts” and a collection-level imposition of structure on atomized parts. Lawson's play staggers between an impulse to present a found poem of American popular, national, and industrial culture, warts and all, and an impulse to submit that culture to the kind of focused critique that could extricate the play from the vaudeville logic of the commodity fetish. This unstable but productive archival détente would give way in Processional's afterlife, when its vaudeville excesses, particularly its representation of stereotyped ethnic difference within the national collection, proved subject to a history of reappraisal and de-accessioning.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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.
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".