“Withersoever We Turn Our Eyes”: Reimagining Democratic Writing in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay studies three books on nineteenth-century US print culture: D. Berton Emerson’s American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures (2024), Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2024), and Susan J. Stanfield’s Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (2022). Examining print micro-cultures, from self-published sermons to obscure urban novels and pamphlets promoting true womanhood among Black men and women, these scholars invest in hope. They take for granted that democracy in some form will flourish in US local cultures and among the common people despite whatever political direction the US nation state itself might be taking. From where does this faith in the inevitable presence of democracy on US soil descend? This essay suggests that scholars remain unconsciously indebted to nineteenth-century providential histories that depicted the US as an originator and avatar of modern democratic revolutions. Working with the assumption that the US at any given moment must be germinating a more just future, these scholars are able to locate insipient democracy in surprising texts. Their hopefulness connects them to a long line of nineteenth-century cultural theorists who believed that US popular and marginal cultures will produce the voices of the democratic future.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".