Prison Samizdat of British Conscientious Objectors in the First World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
P rison samizdat has been described, I think correctly, as "the real prison press" in contrast to the prison press sponsored by, or at least approved by, the jail administration.This samizdat constitutes an underground activity carried on by prisoners "without the sanction of prison officials," and often in conditions of "considerable adversity."lThe discovery of a samizdat journal is likely to lead to the punishment of those responsible for its production and distribution and the destruction of all copies that the authorities have been able to discover.The illlfettered expression of opinion in its pages represents a challenge to the prison establishment that cannot easily be tolerated.The successful pursuit of prison samizdat journalism requires secrecy above all -the concealment of successive issues of the journal so as to prevent confiscation by the jail authorities.To guarantee this secrecy there is need for the presence within the prison population of a closed and reasonably compact group -political prisoners perhaps, or religious or working-class dissidentsamong whom the samizdat journal can circulate without the likelihood of a reader, purposely or through negligence, bringing it to the attention of the authorities.Free circulation of the journal among prisoners would almost certainly expose it sooner or later -indeed, probably sooner rather than laterto this danger and thus put an end to the journal's existence.Editor, contributors, and readers of such samizdat are inevitably drawn from one prisoner group, and the contents of the journal will be oriented towards the interests and concerns of this group.The existence in a given prison of a group of this kind presumably explains why samizdat makes an appearance there, since it provides a potential readership for the journal.Perhaps the most extensive prison samizdat network before mid-twentieth century emerged in World War I Britain among conscientious objectors (COs), incarcerated on account of their resistance to the military conscription introduced there in January 1916.This chapter in the history of "jailhouse journalism" is not, I think, widely known on this continent and it may, therefore, be of interest to readers if I outline the story.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".