An English Chautauqua: the National Home Reading Union and the development of rational holidays in late Victorian Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The success of the Chautauqua Assembly in providing educational holidays in North America in the final quarter of the nineteenth century raised interest in the development of a similar type of holiday in Great Britain. Following the establishment of university extension summer schools, which were themselves influenced by the example of Chautauqua, the Congregationalist social reformer John Brown Paton organised such a holiday in 1889 under the auspices of the National Home Reading Union in Blackpool, a popular seaside resort in the north of England. Adopting the values and practices of the Chautauqua Assembly, this combined informal education, non-conformist Christian morality and socially respectable leisure activities. Although not successful in establishing an English Chautauqua in Blackpool, Paton later mediated the Chautauqua ideal through his sponsorship of the Co-operative Holidays Association, a pioneer organisation in the development of rational holidays. It is argued that both the Chautauqua movement and the National Home Reading Union exercised a crucial influence on the development of rational and respectable holidays in Britain that has not previously been fully recognised.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".