Bibliographic record
Abstract
Late in the year of 1703 a small 40-page octavo almanac entitled The Ladies’ Diary: or, the Womens Almanack, for the Year of our Lord, 1704 containing Directions of Love and Marriage, of Cookery, Preserving, Perfumery, Bills of Fare for every Month, and many other things peculiar to the Fair Sex appeared on booksellers’ shelves priced at three pence. 1 Initially compiled by John Tipper, then the master of Bablake School and a Coventry tutor, the Diary was an immediate hit. 2 ‘Containing many delightful and entertaining particulars, particularly adopted for the use and diversion of the fair-sex,’ The Ladies’ Diary was designed to be accessible while also being just a bit more special than its two-pence competitors. 3 The Stationer’s Company, which held the rights to print all almanacs even as the Licensing Act lapsed, set the price against the protest of Tipper. The fate of an almanac depended a great deal on early sales successes and competition was fierce. Almanacs were, mid-century, England’s most numerous publications and sales had only tapered slightly in the early eighteenth century. 4 Writing to his friend and advisor Humphrey Wanley, Tipper noted the numerous competing titles and worried that The Ladies’ Diary was too expensive to compete effectively in the crowded marketplace. 5 His concerns seem to have been unwarranted; the Diary was extremely competitive. According to Tipper, the first run sold out quickly and 4000 copies of the second edition were sold by January 1705. 6 To give a sense of the scale this represents, ‘this means that as early as the second year of this specialized almanac, one copy had been sold for every five hundred literate individuals in England.’ 7 At the high point in the middle of the eighteenth century roughly 30,000 copies a year were sold and the title sold continuously for 137 years. 8 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.010 |
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".