Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mabel (1880–1942), Essie (1882–1963), Alberta (1888–1964) and Alice (1900–1969) were the daughters of Albery Allson Whitman, a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal church (and a notable poet), and his wife Caddie Whitman. They began performing by singing and dancing in their father’s church and on evangelical tours. Later, they formed a touring company and took on other acts, most notably child performers. In the later years of the company, The Whitman Sisters were the highest paid act on the black vaudeville circuit, called the Theater Owners Booking Association (or Toby), and one of the longest surviving touring companies (1899–1942). The performance group was considered the greatest incubator of dancing talent for black shows on or off Toby, and significantly contributed to American theatre and dance modernism particularly as they challenged race and gender discrimination and stereotypes. While keeping their audiences entertained, they managed to push new ideas about aesthetics, race, class, gender and show business practices. The sisters succeeded in breaking many of the barriers for black women in show business and helped pave the way in the entertainment industry for subsequent black performers by launching the careers of many stars including Count Basie, Bunny Briggs, Jeni Legon, Willie Robinson, Butterbeans and Susie, Billy Kersands, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.442 | 0.095 |
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".