Mike Huggins. Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century gives readers the overwhelming impression of just how important horse races, and equine culture in general, were to the people of Britain. Horse racing touched on most aspects of people’s rural lives, such as how they defined and developed a sense of belonging to a community, how they spent their money, and what occupations predominated within an area. The sport also provides a window into how many negotiated class and gender boundaries, handled political debates, and engaged with religious controversies within a multispecies setting. Horses, in other words, were at the center of human life in a way that scholars are only beginning to recognize. As Mike Huggins correctly points out, there is scant scholarship dedicated to racing pastimes—a scholarly scarcity Huggins works to fix with enthusiasm. The first full-length study of racing’s development in England during the long eighteenth century, Horse Racing is written by a leading scholar in leisure studies—a meritorious expertise that makes itself felt throughout the book. Based upon extensive archival and print research, the book is split into seven independent chapters that set out to paint a comprehensive picture of what the British racing world was like. The book initially sets the scene with a general introduction to the subject, before moving on to think about how horse races influenced society in general. It is here that Huggins makes it abundantly clear just how important races were to the social and cultural lives of all classes and genders throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, as Huggins aptly illustrates, equestrian sport was at the heart of all rural life and was situated alongside other popular entertainments and activities, including theater, hunt meets, conspicuous displays of wealth and status, criminality, and copious feasting. From here Huggins takes the reader into the world of gambling, the most well-studied subject of the book.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.006 |
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".