<i>The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures.</i> By A <scp>rchie</scp> L. D <scp>ick</scp> . <i>The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures</i> . By DickArchie L.. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2012. xvi + 196 pp. $55. <scp>isbn</scp> 978 1 4426 4289 8.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When, how and why a reading culture emerges are questions of real and vital interest. This is especially so where reading itself seems to feed a desire for greater personal and social freedoms. As such there are good reasons to welcome this study, which, though it follows in the wake of several recent South African book and print histories, shifts the focus from production and consecration, and attempts instead to recover neglected stories of readers and reading. Dick is surely right to seek these stories out, even if, in doing so, he gives too little room to questions regarding the nature of reading cultures: how they are constituted and defined, how they are distinguished from one another and from other cultures of literacy, whether verbal or visual. The range of the book is considerable taking in several centuries, locations, and linguistic communities. Beginning with the earliest days of the Cape Colony, its first two chapters consider literacy amongst slaves and Free Blacks as well as the educational policies and pedagogical practices of the Dutch East India Company and the various Christian and Muslim institutions that became increasingly prominent following the abolition of slavery. In subsequent chapters, which proceed chronologically, Dick focuses on the attempts of women's societies of the early twentieth century (Chapter 3) and ‘books for troops' organizations operating dur ing the Second World War (Chapter 4) to promote reading and to use it as a means of inculcating particular values. He next considers the roles of libraries and librarians in supporting and undermining the apartheid state (Chapters 5 and 6), and concludes by addressing the reading experiences of those whose opposition to apartheid led them into exile or prison (Chapters 7 and 8).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.007 |
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".