Mid-Nineteenth Century Weavings from Imerina, Madagascar: A Missionary’s Collection in Dialogue with Contemporaneous Malagasy Texts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Numerous texts in many languages from medieval times praise the beautiful handwoven cloth of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, very few pieces dating before 1870 survive in the subcontinent or in international museums. This is the case for the island nation of Madagascar, eastern Africa’s most active weaving center. Of great interest, therefore, are eleven textiles obtained by the British missionary William Ellis during his various visits to Madagascar from 1853 to 1865, which are today housed at the Royal Ontario Museum. This research note aims to put in dialogue the cloths acquired by Ellis with his writings and early photographs of the island, as well as important contemporaneous descriptions by Malagasy authors. Combining these sources reveals the cloths’ wider historical significance, local aesthetics, and techniques of manufacture. Some represent unique surviving examples of luxury types mentioned in historic literature, while others were hitherto known only from black-and-white images.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".