Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials. By Michael Kammen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xii, 260 pp. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-42329-6.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Kammen's Digging Up the Dead is a fine study, not massive in scope (though chronologically ambitious) but rich in implications and fun to read. The topic—reburials of Americans, from the colonial period onward—is a sure source of good stories, from the amusing to the macabre. Kammen is, additionally, a gifted writer, which makes the stories easygoing. But it is the analytical apparatus that ultimately wins the day. Kammen places his American topic in a careful comparative context: early modern Europe at first, then Eastern Europe and other contemporary sites at the end. Further, he traces clear change in the American experience, linked both to shifts in cemetery practice and the treatment of bodies and to surges of patriotism and memorialism in the nation more generally. Occasionally, the welter of stories takes on a life of its own, but there are some important larger points. Reburials advanced rapidly from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onward; a variety of ad hoc and patriotic societies generated several relocations for leaders during the Revolutionary War, mainly between the 1820s and the 1840s. Momentum continued to increase for several decades. The practice ultimately wrapped around the echoes of the Civil War, embracing regional disputes about who could claim whom for reburial (with the South winning most disputes, as the author plausibly argues that the symbolism was more important in southern culture at least in the wake of defeat). Reburials declined in number for several decades around the turn of the century, only to surge briefly again in the 1930s. Since that point, the practice in the United States has become more exceptional.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
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".