15. Happy Yardi Gras! Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carnival season in New Orleans is a playful time. People of all ages play with words as they come up with themes for floats, costumes and throws (small gifts thrown to spectators). They play with materials and crafting skills as they make these items. They play with personas, roles and hedonic pleasures as they participate in the parades and parties that culminate in Mardi Gras day. With the 2021 parades cancelled, New Orleanians set about re-imagining carnival for pandemic times, playing with its structures to be able to celebrate at a safe distance. The idea that most captured their imaginations was the Krewe of House Floats, a Twitter joke that accidentally inspired thousands of households to decorate their homes as parade floats. Drawing on anthropological and geographical approaches to play and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over seven carnival seasons, I analyze the continuities and ruptures of playful carnival practices that were manifest in the creations and testimonies of people who participated in this phenomenon, also dubbed ‘Yardi Gras’. Like regular carnival, the house floats reflected uneven access to resources, materials, and know-how. Unlike regular carnival, they featured less satire and more whimsy, and often paid tribute to beloved local cultural icons. They also resituated carnival in domestic and neighbourhood space and sociality, temporarily reversing a trend toward centralization, and were a product of pandemic-specific temporality. Because carnival is re-made every year through improvisation and responsiveness to current events, resourcefulness and creativity are built into its social structure. I argue that this is what enabled its playful reconfiguration.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.002 |
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".