The Goodness of Gilmore: Examining the Moralization of Reading in the Rory Gilmore-inspired Readathons of BookTube
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper seeks to find out how assumptions surrounding the moralization of reading appear in the BookTube videos of readers inspired by Rory Gilmore, the bibliophilic protagonist of the Warner Bros. comedy-drama series Gilmore Girls. In doing so, it aims to illuminate the ways in which the myth of the “moralization” of reading is used to disguise complex relations between class, privilege, and meritocracy, both within Gilmore Girls and without. Building from the scholarship of Harvey J. Graff, Deborah Brandt, Q. D. Leavis, and Janis Radway, I first analyze how literacy has come to be associated with goodness and what sort of literature is thought to be related to moral righteousness. Using this framework, I then analyze the appearance of reading in Gilmore Girls itself, concluding that beliefs surrounding the virtue of reading linger even in the fictional world of Stars Hollow. Finally, I analyze two Rory Gilmore-inspired readathon videos, arguing that by echoing Rory’s own perspectives on reading, BookTubers demonstrate that the belief that reading is an unequivocal moral good persists, even if readers themselves are not aware of it.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it