Animal Things, Human Language, and Children’s Education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I analyze the animal materials incorporated into eighteenth-century educational products that were intended to teach children to read. I begin with an ivory alphabet toy and then extend my analysis to children’s books by Sarah Trimmer, John Aikin, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Working at the intersection of material culture studies and animal studies enables new readings of this collection of familiar didactic texts by connecting the animals represented in them to the animal products used to make children’s textual toys. In both toys and books, linguistic systems are made from animal parts so that human subjects can be distinguished from animal objects. While animal life and meaning are emptied out in this process of objectification, the animal thing persistently asserts itself, revealing the beauty of rational order to be the disordered remains of another, animal form. By attending to these animal things, we can recognize and reread eighteenth-century texts as animal relics.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 it