‘Watching the Papers Daily in Fear and Trembling’: The Boer War and the Invention of Masculine Middlebrow Literary Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It would be difficult to overemphasize the extent to which the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) influenced British literature in the first decade of the twentieth century. The direct and indirect effects of this conflict permeated all aspects of the print culture of the period, and in doing so fundamentally refashioned the existing cultural field. To understand the reasons why the connections between historical event and literary culture were so profound we first need to recognize the contemporary significance of the Boer War. Until this conflict was overshadowed by later clashes fought on much grander scales, few commentators considered the Boer War to be anything less than a truly great imperial war: the title of Conan Doyle’s history of the conflict, The Great Boer War (1900) captures well the contemporary sense of the scale of the war. As Thomas Pakenham further argues: ‘It proved to be the longest (two and three-quarter years), the costliest (over £200 million), the bloodiest (at least twenty-two thousand British, twenty-five thousand Boer and twelve thousand African lives) and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914’ (Pakenham, 1982: p. xv). This major international war also happened to take place at a time when the British news media was undergoing a period of revolution. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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.
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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".