Digital Obsolescence? Abandoned blogs in the francophone African literary field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay analyzes the blogs or websites of three francophone African writers: Alain Mabanckou, Leonora Miano, and Bessora, who at one time all had active blogs or websites related to their creative work. Digital spaces are still comparatively marginalized in the Francophone literary field when compared with institutions such as historically established publishing houses, literary prizes, and even geographical centers of the literary arts. In this transitional moment between traditional and digital modes of production, African writers working in French often embrace new creative platforms without turning their backs on the old. At times, they even leave the digital behind for historically established codes and forms, abandoning online spaces as they gain footholds in the Parisian-centered literary industry. Of the writers considered here, Bessora is the only one who still maintains her blog. Mabanckou’s online presence has shifted to other platforms like Instagram and Twitter, with more promotional (as opposed to aesthetic) motivations, while Miano has largely gone silent from the spaces she once occupied. Specifically for African writers working in French, I posit that their different, evolving uses of digital platforms reflect their rising relative positions in the literary field in French.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".