Bibliographic record
Abstract
P.T Barnum put on a performance as an owner of enslaved individuals, white Americans poked at Black Africans behind bars in zoos, and children pulled on the dreadlocks of two kidnapped men: for many Americans, it was the greatest form of entertainment. American “freak shows” were sites of racism, re-enactment of enslavement dynamics, and white entitlement. Black individuals who were enfreaked in nineteenth and early twentieth century American sideshows were forced into performances of white superiority and Black inferiority. These sideshows were not merely entertainment: they were vessels to construct social ideas of white ownership of Black individuals and audiences in post-emancipation America. Figures like Joice Heth, Ota Benga, the Batwa people, and George and Willie Muse reveal that sideshows were utilized to uphold a racialized American identity. This paper will argue that the “freak show” acted as a staged performance of race that enabled white control over Black bodies. Additionally, this paper argues that these mistreatments on the sideshow stage were embodied dimensions of the social construction of racial hierarchy in America.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".