Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, monolingualism has become an object of renewed scholarly scrutiny. Divergent as they may be, accounts of its entrenchment typically concur that trade publishers, especially their Anglophone variety, have acted as catalysts in the process. This article questions the assumption by zooming in on the case of an established Boston-based house, Houghton Mifflin, during World War II, i.e. the time when paper rationing and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
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 | 0.017 | 0.087 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.045 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
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".