Oral Histories as a Window to Sociolinguistic History and Language History: Exploring Earlier Ontario English with the Farm Work and Farm Life Since 1890 Oral History Collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archival oral histories provide sociolinguists with invaluable empirical insight, particularly with respect to studying vernaculars of the past. Because the goal of the oral history methodology is to capture authentic, first-person accounts, the recordings are comparable to sociolinguistic interviews. In this audio feature, the Farm Work and Farm Life Since 1890 Oral History project, which contains interviews with elderly farmers in Ontario, Canada, born between 1890 and 1920, is used to exemplify the utility of oral histories, particularly for variationist sociolinguists. The audio feature first demonstrates the parallels between sociolinguistic interviews and oral histories: both exhibit Labovian “casual speech” and high-emotive topics, both diminish the role of the interviewer, and, perhaps most importantly for variationist sociolinguists, both contain sociolinguistic variation. The remainder of the audio feature highlights some of this variation, including negative concord, was/were variation, and discourse like, and closes with a discussion of two revelations about the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic nature of the speech communities examined.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".