<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.
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
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).
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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