A transnational newspaper dataset covering Spenceanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To analyse the media legacy of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary "Plan", and his disciples (the "Spencean Philanthropists") in global press circuits, a dataset consisting of 275 Spencean-related articles in newspapers from Ireland (106 articles), the British West Indies (35), British India (29), the Australian colonies (4), Canada (1), and the United States (100) was created. The corpus consists of either the full text of each article or relevant extracts, as well as additional metadata such as source, date, title (if applicable), keyword, and region. In particular, the following databases have been relied upon: the Irish Newspaper Archives for Ireland, the Caribbean Newspapers: Digital Library of the Caribbean and Caribbean Newspapers 1718–1876 for the British West Indies, Newspapers & Gazettes – Trove for Australia, America's Historical Newspapers and Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers for the US, Newspapers.com by Ancestry for Canada, Ireland, and the US, and the British Newspaper Archive for British India, Ireland, and the Caribbean. These databases were searched using the following keywords: "Thomas Spence" [1750–1814], "Spence's Plan", "Spencean" / "Spenceans", and "Spenceanism"; "swinish multitude", "people's farm", and "pigs' meat" were also used. All databases checked for Australia, the Caribbean, India, and Canada have been exhausted, and many Irish and US-American articles have also been grabbed. Due to the low scan quality of databases, most articles needed to be copied and corrected manually. The 275 articles of the corpus consist of 167,515 tokens. In addition, 157 articles on Spence and the Spenceans from British newspapers have been downloaded, too, and were added to this dataset for qualitative analysis and comparative purposes. Overall, the dataset made available here thus consists of 432 articles. The results from analysing this corpus are shown and discussed in a paper entitled "Transnational Echoes of Spenceanism: A Text Mining Exploration in English-Language Newspapers (1790–1850)", which is accepted for publication in the International Review of Social History (IRSH).
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.024 |
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".