Contemporary hobby knitting: the preservation and reinvention of traditional craft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knitting today is a hobby activity that provides knitters with a sense of connectedness with their families' past and of participating in a fundamental element of their culture. Knitting's existence in contemporary popular culture demonstrates the widespread desire in Western society to make links with an idealized past. This thesis is based on interviews with ten knitters, in St. John's, Newfoundland, analysis of the objects they produce and observations of a regular gathering of knitters. -- This study has found, knitters emphasize the importance of the act of knitting, as well as the importance of producing functional objects. Contemporary hobby knitters preserve tradition by continuing to use the same techniques as have a long tradition of use in their families and their communities. However, knitters strive to make hand knit objects functional for today's users by conforming to contemporary fashion trends and using modern materials. Migrating away from, and back to, Newfoundland has had the effect of solidifying some knitters' sense of knitting as symbolic of Newfoundland culture. Knitting also offers today's frequently migrating urbanites comfort by providing a sense of belonging to a universal culture that goes beyond the sense of belonging to a particular place or time. Furthermore, the contemporary phenomenon of knitting as a hobby reflects the strength of the knitting tradition in Newfoundland, despite the influence of external culture, such as printed patterns, and hobby knitters today contribute to the evolution of Newfoundland knitting. My aim is to discover how women today are using traditional knowledge as a force for social change.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".