Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much scholarly energy has been spent on reuniting detached manuscript fragments with their original medieval codices, but far less attention has been paid to the pre-twentieth-century albums and scrapbooks which were these fragments’ transitory homes. This article considers the fixing of fragments of medieval manuscripts into blank books during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates the ubiquity of the practice of presenting and preserving miniatures and examples of calligraphy in such contexts, and considers when, why, by whom, and how these assemblages were created. Though now mostly associated with male collectors, the likelihood that women were involved in the physical assembly of albums and scrapbooks is explored, through a focus on Glasgow University Library MS Euing 26 and its creator Esther Cory. In very many instances such albums were subsequently disassembled to facilitate the more profitable sale of individual fragments. Lot descriptions in nineteenth-century sale catalogues provide important testimony to the existence of now vanished albums, and that evidence is interrogated for information about their nature and material forms. A preliminary checklist of extant and disassembled albums and scrapbooks is included in an Appendix.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.003 |
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".