Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/. Created and maintained by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Reviewed June 15-18, 2006
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Edison's film and sound ventures shaped American experience of cultural and technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inventing Entertainment provides ample primary materials on listening and spectatorship in that era. The 341 Edison films date from 1891, when Edison began his camera tests, to 1918, when his film production company folded. Although Edison began recording sound in 1877, the collection presents only eighty-one disc recordings made from 1913 to 1922. A few accompanying materials include advertisements, posters, and original magazine articles. Visitors can search the collection or browse by genre and chronology. The film section is extensive and sufficiently contextualized for lay audiences. Because copyright law did not cover motion pictures until 1912, early film producers sent segments of their motion pictures as paper prints to the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. Edison provided frame-by-frame renditions of entire works, here transferred to digital video. The genres of film include actualities— short films of celebrities, news, disasters, work, travel, technology, scenic views, and expositions—as well as pioneering comedies, animation, trick films, reenactments, advertisements, and dramas. One innovative drama, The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed by Edwin S. Porter, features a famous sequence of a bandit shooting straight into the camera. Viewers can compare the Spanish-American War actualities Wreck of the Battleship “Maine” (1898) and Colored Troops Disembarking (1898) with after-the-fact reenactments of the war's events, such as Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan, filmed in 1899 in New Jersey with National Guard troops standing in for the volunteers. Accompanying essays link the films to early U.S. film history as well as to Edison's life, inventions, and business.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.535 | 0.236 |
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".