Friedman, May & SilviaSchultermandl (eds). Click and kin: transnational identity and quick media. viii, 248 pp., map, bibliogrs. Toronto: Univ. Press, 2016. £27.95 (paper)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Douglas Johnson'sEmpire and the Nuer is a fascinating collection of primary documents covering the period of the British conquest of Southern Sudan, accompanied by his expert contextualization and commentary.Focusing on the pacification of the Nuer -the last pacification campaign in Africa -the book aims to achieve several disparate, though not contradictory, goals.First, since this violent history shaped the political processes that followed in Southern Sudan, the collection promises to provide insights into political and military conflict up until the present.The focus on figures from the British side of the encounter aims to fashion an 'anthropology of administration'.Finally, because the Nuer are arguably anthropology's most famous case study, the collection is useful both in problematizing received views of the Nuer and in providing insights into the conditions through which Evans-Pritchard produced his classic works.The book is organized principally around twenty-four primary administrative documents spanning the period 1898-1930.In line with the collection's aims and because documents on other topics have been published elsewhere, the focus is on the process of pacification.Five interviews conducted by Johnson between 1975 and 1981 with Nuer and Dinka who witnessed events constitute a mini-counter-archive, providing significantly different details, and certainly very dissimilar interpretations, than are to be found in administrators' accounts.An abstract of Evans-Pritchards' 1938 lecture on the problem of administration in Southern Sudan forms the book's epilogue.Empire and the Nuer should be of interest to a variety of audiences.The documents likely are of greatest interest to historians of Sudan, though such specialists are likely to pursue a wider range of materials in the archives themselves.While specialists may seek more, however, there may be too much for non-specialists.Although I enjoyed the collection -particularly as supplemented by Johnson's expert curation and engaging commentary -this type of book does not beg to be read cover to cover, even if the history contained therein can be best appreciated in that way.Moreover, while a collection is fairly common in history, I find modest irony in the notion of a curated set of original documents: the process of curation naturally undermines their originality/representativeness.As in a highlights reel, a message is produced through the way that documents are selected and compiled.While Johnson's expertise makes him uniquely suited for this task, such curation is nonetheless somewhat antithetical to the special charm and value of archival research.Rich colonial archival materials are semi-logical hodgepodges composed more of mundane, everyday affairs than grand projects, and of documents originally produced for many different audiences and purposes.An organizational theme to lend justice to such messiness might look more like Borges's apocryphal Celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge in his essay 'The analytical language of John Wilkins ' (1942; in Other inquisitions,
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.021 |
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".