An Imagined Community of Their Own: Voices of Italian Immigrants in <i>Il Lavoratore Italiano</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution proposes to reflect on the experience and sense of identity of Italians through the analysis of Il Lavoratore Italiano, an Italian-language radical weekly newspaper published in Kansas from 1905 to 1927. A mouthpiece for Italian rank-and-file radicals in the U.S., the periodical opened its pages to readers established in mining communities throughout the Midwest, the Mountain States, and the Southwest. Based on the analysis of all issues of the newspaper dated 15 December 1905 to 24 August 1906, this essay examines the interactions at work within and around Il Lavoratore Italiano between the newspaper’s editors and its readers, with editors of different publications and radicals of different persuasions, and between readers. The author stresses the overall importance of exchanges among readers themselves, as well as the role these exchanges at the bottom end of the editorial process actually played in shaping early communities of Italian immigrants who still largely defined themselves in local terms, in spite of their radical sympathies and the editors’ agenda. With their personal networks of relatives and friends dispersed in a significant number of mining towns across the U.S., Italian labour migrants would commonly use the newspaper’s pages to keep in touch with faraway communities and share the information they needed to circulate among them. To these “Italian workers of the world”, Il Lavoratore Italiano proved to be a very efficient means to reinforce their networks and reduce, in the process, the distances between mining communities.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".