Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tanya Richardson. Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 240 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $70.00, cloth. $29.95, paper.Anthropologist Tanya Richardson was drawn by the complexities of history in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa to explore how diversity and place combine to nurture identity. Officially established in its current incarnation in 1794 by Russian Empress Catherine II as a window onto the Black Sea and Mediterranean, the frontier settlement quickly emerged as a randy mix of nationalities and cultures. Richardson wants to understand how the city's presumed peculiarities - its blend of nationalities, tolerant attitudes, cuisine, dialect, joie de vivre, sense of humour, southern temperament, resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit - define a distinctive Odessan sense of history within a newly independent Ukraine.The core of Richardson's work is based on an urban ethnography of history and place carried out through fieldwork conducted during 2001-2002 and 2005. She focuses on residents who have remained in place over time, thereby establishing a sense of continuity during a period of overwhelming transformation. In particular, she examines how residents view the famous Moldovanko neighbourhood as a place generates and embodies the notion of kolorit, which can be glossed as colour, character, carnivalesque, or an exotic character (p. 107). She pays special attention to the role of courtyards and markets in producing Odessa's unique self-image. She also examines the role of local history and preservation groups in sustaining the city's sense of place, taking particular note of the Odessa Literary Museum as a monument to local myth. The pages reporting her exploration of the city are populated with strong personalities, colourful characters, as well as with smart and wise advocates of a distinctive Odessan identity.Like wetlands in the natural environment, such mixing bowls of urban diversity as Moldovanko often appear to outsiders to be little more than wastelands. They are the first places to be rebuilt, redesigned, re-conceived, and re-constituted when reformers think about improving a city. Yet, this is a terrible mistake. Like wetlands, these spaces are among the most productive corners of the urban environment. Richardson smartly chooses to place her attention on those places within contemporary Odessa hold the promise of enriching the city at large.Dutifully running through the various theoretical concepts relating to intricate cultural layering, Richardson rejects many of the most obvious - borderlands, cosmopolitanism, historical memory, phenomenologies of place, national and imperial historiographies, and heterotopias - as analytically imprecise. …
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".