“A Day in the Life of Daisy the Blouse Maker in 1916”: Storytelling as a Creative Research and Teaching Methodology in Fashion History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article presents a creative storytelling methodology for working with incomplete research materials where the desired outcome is to understand fashion's design and manufacturing histories from the perspective of workers on the factory floor. Using an amalgamation of primary research from business archives, oral histories, trade papers, and contemporary fiction, a day in the life of a fictional blouse maker named Daisy is presented here as a short story. Written and continually refined during the process of my doctoral study, Daisy's story pieces together the process of industrial blouse design and making in the ready-made industry in Britain in the second decade of the twentieth century. Drawing on ideas present in Actor-Network Theory, the maker and her machine form the basis of a conjoined historical ethnographic study. Finally, through pedagogical application, I suggest two approaches for teaching this technique to students to heighten engagement with research, stimulate new avenues of thought, and offer creative enjoyment during the process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".