Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture. By John A. Burrison. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. v+236, contents, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-1-934110-21-8, pbk.] Roots of a Region is a comprehensive book that scratches the surface of numerous folk traditions in the Southern United States. Describing these traditions, Burrison works to identify this region that is so intriguing and conceptualized, yet also difficult to define and isolate. Nevertheless, this book offers a valuable glimpse into the region and would benefit anyone interested in the Southern United States. Burrison's writing style is accessible and provides the reader with wonderful descriptions and basic folklore theories without letting jargon hinder his goal. It is very much written from on the ground experience in the South and because of that, it would be a beneficial example of how to study folklore in any introductory folklore course. The book begins with Burrison's personal folklore journey: his childhood encounter with Leadbelly, his introduction to folklore at Pennsylvania State University, and his experiences studying folklore at the graduate level at the University of Pennsylvania. After school he was given a job in the English Department at Georgia State University to develop an undergraduate folklore curriculum. Being given this task and moving to the South after spending his whole life in the Northeastern United States, Burrison began to take note of his surroundings, using the North as a point of comparison. With the help of his students, he began to pull out what he found to be the most defining characteristics of the South. In this book's first chapter, Burrison broadly discusses the region in question by looking at its history and fuzzy boundaries (23) as well as the characteristics often associated with its people, their way of life, and their beliefs. The following chapter shifts to an attempt to define the region based on a series of folklore genres. Beginning with material culture and the basic necessities of life, Burrison explains how practical tools for living (such as food, homes, textiles) have come to give the South its current regional identity. He then moves to oral forms and folk beliefs that also give the region its unique character, all leading to the conclusion that the South is A Region of Retentions (79) by demonstrating continuity with the past. Chapter three allows Burrison to actually discuss the historical roots of some of the South's defining characteristics by explaining the indigenous and international influences on the region and way of life. Part of what makes the South so unique are the African traditions that have played a major role in shaping numerous southern traditions, from song and dance to pottery and clothing. After completing these generalizations Burrison moves to the specific. His experience with studying folk pottery in the South becomes clear in the fourth chapter as he delves into the genre, particularly focused on jugs as they have developed in the South and discussing all of their possible origins. Burrison stays specific with the next chapter which focuses on Georgia as a representative state of the southern region. …
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".