Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s. By Thomas Adam. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xii, 239 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-253-35274-3.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Adam has written an interesting but largely unpersuasive book about the role of an elite transatlantic culture that shaped philanthropy in Europe and the United States between the 1840s and the 1930s. Adam narrows his subject in “classifying philanthropy as part of conspicuous consumption” (p. 8), engaged in by “new” (aspirational) and “old” (established) elites through sponsoring social housing, museum, and library projects. Adam essentially makes three arguments: (1) that elites within Europe (England and Germany) and North America (Canada and the United States) participated in an intercultural transfer that shaped conceptions of private action for the public good, and the means of pursuing them, on both sides of the Atlantic; (2) that established elites in each of the subject communities engaged in philanthropic activity primarily as a means of gaining social status and exercising social power; and (3) that aspiring elites and certain groups of people traditionally excluded from power positions (women, Catholics, Jews) were able to gain both social status and power by engaging in philanthropy—though women, Catholics, and Jews found greater accommodation from the established elites than did the nouveau riche.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".