Bibliographic record
Abstract
Montreal’s early experiences of Black theatre go back to the minstrel shows of the 1850s at the Odd Fellow’s Hall and the Garrick Club Theatre. These shows seldom involved Black artists. The companies consisted of white performers, who painted their faces black to adopt the facial traits of the Black performer. These minstrel shows presented caricatures of Blacks, in an extremely racist and demeaning light. In 1851, a Black group, called the Real Ethiopian Serenaders from Philadelphia, added to this buffoonery and the demeaning of Blacks, through its Shaker burlesque act. Garry Collison writes that parodies like the [Real] Ethiopian Serenaders’ “Shaker Burlesque” or the standard comic lecturer who spouted gibberish “played flagrantly to the white racist beliefs in the intellectual inferiority of blacks” (Collison 180). Far from educating its audiences as to the social value of Blacks and Black culture, the shows served to implant images of Blacks as childlike, of low intellectual capacity, and incapable of being assimilated into white society and civilization; as capable merely of a clownish, clumsy imitation of white culture (Collison 180). The minstrel shows continued to be a very popular form of theatrical entertainment throughout the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Their racist social content received very little critical disapproval in the press of the time. In fact, historian Robin Winks considers this to be one of the principal instruments by which Canadians had, by the end of the nineteenth century, learned to be racist in their perception of and attitudes towards Blacks. It took approximately eighty years, after the 1851 appearance of the Ethiopian Serenaders at the Royal Theatre, before we began to see the emergence in Montreal of the social, political and economic conditions from which a theatre movement initiated by Blacks, for Black expression, development and pride could take root.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.003 |
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".