Biographical Narratives in 20th-Century Southern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This roundtable intends to discuss biographical narratives in 20th-century Southern Africa with the purpose of understanding how particular personal trajectories are articulated to broader contexts through the consideration of the political and religious projects in which the subjects of such biographies were involved. We focus on different trajectories at different historical moments: the first case considers how Sol Plaatje acquired a Protestant habitus during his time at the Pniel mission as well as the relationship between his training and teaching at the mission and subsequent participation in the Brotherhood Federation movement in the two first decades of the 20th century; the second case focuses on the trajectory of Jesse Chipenda, an important Protestant pastor who was one of the first students to be trained as a leader of the native church at the missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the Central Highlands of Angola in the second quarter of the 20th century; the third case study considers the biographies of members of a group of missionaries who founded a Comboni mission in Mozambique (1964-2002) which played an important role in the Mozambican education system. The ones who write such biographies claim the right to tell the story of these subjects, usually with the purpose of portraying their predestined political and religious leadership. It is thus also our purpose to understand the appropriation of these biographies by their biographers and the context within which they are produced.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".