“I Doubt If They Were Unusual”: Race and Place in Helen Creighton’s 1967 African Nova Scotian Recording Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Helen Creighton (1899–1989) was one of Canada’s foremost folk song collectors and folklorists. Her fieldwork, which spanned the late 1920s to the mid- 1960s, centred on her home province of Nova Scotia. This article critically examines Helen Creighton’s 1967 recording project in African Nova Scotian communities, particularly in the historic settlement of Africville during its notorious displacement by the city government of Halifax. Despite receiving little attention in the half-century since, the 1967 project offers considerable insight into the place of race and racialization in Creighton’s influential conception of Nova Scotian folk culture. I argue that Creighton observed a double standard around the authenticity of the African Nova Scotian songs she collected vis-à-vis those collected in white communities, and that this inequitable treatment was intrinsically connected to the rhetorical and physical displacement of African Nova Scotians that underwrote her project.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".