Signing on: A reconsideration of Newfoundland seafarers’ ‘illiteracy’, 1860-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Newfoundland-born seafarers stood out from others aboard nineteenth- and twentieth-century vessels by the relative frequency with which they used an ‘x’ to sign a crew agreement. According to historians’ conventions, this identified them as illiterate. Inadequacy in reading and writing skills is often construed as ignorance, a supposition David Alexander challenged in his 1970s study of social and economic inequality. In a more concerted analysis of Newfoundland seafarers’ literacy skills, I argue against the binary understanding of literate and illiterate people. In a place where maritime activity has spawned a strong oral culture, the groundwork of researchers based in Memorial University has facilitated an understanding of the dynamic and robust nature of vernacular knowledge. Nevertheless, a lack of education can operate ideologically and materially as discriminatory. While the evidence comes from a predominantly male workplace, I take into account the methods by which seafarers acquired reading and writing capabilities. Considering women’s higher literacy rates and their role in education in Newfoundland bridges seafarers’ lives onshore and at sea.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.007 | 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".