“Abracadabra”: Intimate Inventions by Early College Women in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What did it mean to aspire to become a college woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when this social identity was taking shape? I take a core sample of a particular place and time, Smith College in western Massachusetts in the early 1880s to examine the early formation of student culture as a critical element in the transformation of Victorian daughters into the New Women of the early twentieth century. In the first-person narratives of an extraordinarily well-documented circle of undergraduate friends whose private papers constitute what I call a group archive, we can observe a new social identity under construction. The individual identities that emerge are vibrantly personal yet nonetheless demonstrate the power of the group in shaping each other’s identities. Residential college culture heightens our awareness of identities as relational, and mutually constituted. In memorabilia books, diaries, and letters home a new sense of themselves emerges as intellectually capable, ambitiously self-confident, organizationally talented, and exuberantly free to improvise their own social world. The friendship group provides the fertile medium for self-invention and their narratives the very instruments through which the self is fashioned.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".