Singaporeans and their past : the dynamics of historical consciousness and historymaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
National surveys conducted in America, Australia and Canada since the mid 1990s suggest that 'a sense of history' is an essential part of everyday life. The surveys found that contrary to popular perceptions of historical apathy, people in these countries valued the past and are actively engaged in historical activities as part of their daily lives. These studies substantiate claims that historical consciousness, broadly understood as the relationship between people and their past, is ubiquitous and universal - everyone has some sense of the past. Yet, as this thesis will show, the specific ways people understand the past and the activities they engage in are not universal, but rather culturally and contextually bound; there are different 'senses' of history or types of historical consciousnesses. This thesis investigates historical consciousness in Singapore and how shifts in the Singaporean 'sense of history' are inextricably linked to its culture and context. I posit that historical consciousness in Singapore is moving away from traditional Asian forms of relating to the past - such as through the maintenance of rituals and celebration of festivals - towards a more critical form of historical consciousness that is less tradition-bound and one in which history can be discussed, critiqued and actively created by ordinary people. Yet Singaporeans continue to retain some links to traditional forms of history-making and reveal an endless capacity for adaptation that characterises Singapore society. In addition, a national or 'Singaporean' sense of historical consciousness has begun to emerge. My analysis suggests that ordinary Singaporeans are becoming more actively engaged in producing or 'making' not only their own history but national history in the public realm despite an environment where the government has traditionally dominated almost all aspects of public history. Through exploring history-making efforts in five specific areas - personal history, family history, history film and television, conservation of historic buildings and sites, and national myth and heroes - this thesis demonstrates that public history is a complex process of contestation and negotiation between different histories and history-makers. Singapore citizens are however better positioned to play a larger role in public history aided by technologies of the 21st century and gradually liberalised political environment. As history-makers they are able to expand the public understanding of history by offering alternative or oppositional histories to the dominant ones, and through their practices, they are paving the way for more democratic means of history-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".