Susan Smulyan . Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid‐Century . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press . 2007 . Pp. 202. $35.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do the following have in common: amateur minstrel shows, nylon and nylon stockings, Hollywood films exported to Occupied Japan, and advertising novels published by Madison Avenue professionals in the fifteen years after World War II? According to Susan Smulyan, all of these goods and diversions show how “powerful groups and institutions (white middle-class people, DuPont, the federal government, bestselling authors)” used cultural forms to convey complex ideologies about race, class, gender, nationhood, and consumption (p. 15). Smulyan, whose book grew out of efforts to convince students that popular culture is not simply escapist, is particularly interested in the power dynamics associated with mass culture. (She quotes John B. Thompson's definition of ideology: “meaning in the service of power” [p. 14].) As she notes, cultural historians have often emphasized the role of the audience in “the meaning-making happening in popular culture.” As a result, they have tended to downplay “the role, and the real strength, of the cultural producers” (p. 8). Smulyan seeks to refocus attention on these powerful players by drawing her four case studies from the middle decades of the twentieth century, years when popular culture was giving way to a “commodified mass culture” that was “less open to audience input” (p. 4).
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.027 |
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".