Archives, prisons and person-centred historical praxis: doing social history research on incarceration in colonial Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bringing together methods and perspectives from critical archive studies, African history, social history and critical prison studies, this article considers the opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations that arise when doing social history research on colonial African prisons using official archives. We argue that while such records can provide valuable information, engagement with these documents needs to be grounded in recognition of their ‘person-ness’. This involves acknowledging the power dynamics and coercion that shaped the creation and content of official archives, prioritising the experiences of incarcerated people, and using the records in a way that recognises the limits of consent in terms of their origins and use. By turning to a person-centred historical praxis, researchers can not only play a key role in furthering our knowledge of colonial carceral systems but can also help to challenge these systems and their afterlives.
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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 | 0.026 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".