The English provincial book trade: evidence from the<i>British book trade index</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter explores British book trade index (BBTI)'s evidence for the systematic study of the English provincial book trade. In attempting to identify the scale of book-trade activity in the provinces between 1700 and 1850, BBTI records have been used to create a series of comparative 'snapshots' at twenty-five-year intervals for twenty-eight selected English provincial towns. This chapter shows the ratio of printers per thousand population in Bristol and Liverpool, and the development of printing in two medium-sized East Midlands market towns, namely, Leicester and Nottingham. Clearly, in order to understand the apparent surge in printing activity in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, one needs to delve beneath the broad term 'printer' to discover what exactly the traders so described were doing. Valuable evidence for the day-to-day work of the 'jobbing' printer has been presented by John Feather who cites, for example, the specialist box printer John Varden and the printer Cheney in Banbury in 1790.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".