“Oh, You Black Bottom!” Appropriation, Authenticity, and Opportunity in the Jazz Dance Teaching of 1920s New York
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Head tossed back wearing a mile-wide grin, ecstatic arms stretched to the sky, jutting knees counterbalancing a substantial backside—the Jazz Age had no symbol more potent than the moving black body (Figure 1). Nearly always an illustration, and in many cases a caricature, these images depicted anonymous black movers rather than recognizable individuals. Yet, looking beyond this superficial representation, it was actually visibly white dance professionals who primarily marketed jazz steps to the American public as teachers and choreographers. A quick glance through the pages of the nascent Dance Magazine of the 1920s reveals numerous jass dance routines with names such as “High Yaller,” “Pickin’ Cotton,” “The Savannah Stomp,” and the “Hula-Charleston,” each represented by a specific white Broadway performer (Fig. 2). Standing just behind each dancer, however, is a dark dancing figure that remains nameless and faceless.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it