When travelers swarm forth: antebellum urban aesthetics and the contours of the political
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Walt Whitman, democratic crowd champion bar none, salutes the people of the polity, he looks to the masses crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the crowds milling about Manhattan's commercial district, the tides flowing through Broadway. In other words, he does not look to explicitly political crowds, such as those in Baltimore rioting against rampant bank faults in the late 1830s, or those in upstate New York rebelling against rents on long term leases in the 1830s and 1840s, or even those widely admired Dorrites demanding suffrage expansion and forming an extra-legal People's Convention to protest the elected state government in Rhode Island in 1842. Similarly, when Hawthorne scrutinizes what it means to be a “naturalized citizen,” he turns to an everyday crowd scene: a train-station peddler selling his goods to the “travellers [who] swarm forth.” Such literary enterprises testify to the trend, begun in the antebellum period, to displace revolutionary crowds with urban crowds in representations of the fledgling democracy's populace. They accord with Tocqueville's observation in 1838 that “[a]t this moment perhaps there is no country in the world harboring fewer germs of revolution than America.” Indeed such crowd representations bear the mark of a polity preoccupied less with self-installation than self-maintenance. This is not to say that those writing in the antebellum period lost all interest in representing revolutionary crowds, but that their support for such crowd action was at best ambivalent.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".