Diamonds and Emotions in the Minerals Gallery: Civilizing Emodities in the Age of Liberal Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines discourse about diamonds and affect in London’s major geological and mineralogical galleries in the nineteenth century. While these institutions offered services to industries built around mineral extraction, their exhibition galleries also did important cultural work to promote the value of specific minerals to consumer publics. I argue that the metropolitan space of mineralogical exhibits was understood to create a tempered, and thus ‘civilized,’ emotional experience for visitors. In general consumer culture, diamonds were understood as emotional commodities (emodities) that derived value from both marking and eliciting heightened emotions; knowing this, the minerals galleries trustees offered the public a place to engage with diamonds in a ‘sobering’ manner. Gallery designers encouraged visitors to trade their whimsically romantic feelings about diamonds with ‘interested,’ patriotic ones. Galleries did this by promoting the idea that diamonds were intrinsically interesting and objectively superior minerals that deserved special scientific attention for the good of the nation-empire. By extension, diamonds also merited their high market value and national-imperial investment. Mineral galleries rationalized the diamond market for consumers by scientifically validating diamonds as emodities; diamonds also worked to animate mineral galleries as spaces of heritage-making in London. That legacy continues today.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".