<i>Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820</i> . By M <scp>ark</scp> R. M. T <scp>owsey</scp> <i>Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820</i> . By TowseyMark R. M.. (Library of the Written Word, 10; The Handpress World, 5). Leiden: Brill. 2010. 361 pp. €99. <scp>isbn</scp> 978 90 04 18432 9.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Book history can, with some authority, provide us with facts about production and distribution. It can excise the underground of piracy and adjudicate instances of the theft and vandalism of books. But witnessing readership is a far greater challenge, and one that has too often been baffled by the obfuscations of theory. Mark Towsey is among recent scholars including, notably, David Allan in Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England 2007 and Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England 2010 and, more controversially, William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 2004, who have attempted an empirical account of reading during the long eighteenth century. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1695–1830 2009 and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, 1707–1800 2011 also make readerships a significant part of their mandates. Towsey, whose work appears in the Edinburgh History, undertakes specifically to map the geography of provincial reading in enlightenment Scotland.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
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".