‘To others it’s just tape': exploring meaning making and the striping system in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) instruction typically focuses on its self defense, competition, fitness and fun. Practitioners earn and progress through coloured belts to signify skill within the sport. Although existing research has explored how the promotion to a new belt is symbolically significant enough to warrant a ceremony, to our knowledge, little academic focus has unpacked the constructed meaning of BJJ ‘stripes’ – a piece of white tape that practitioners earn and wear on their current belt to signify progress between belts. Using symbolic interactionist perspectives, we identify a BJJ ‘online community of practice’ that has developed on message boards and Facebook groups dedicated to amateur BJJ; and analyse how community members discuss the significance of ‘stripes’ as tied to achievement, perseverance, and self-identity. BJJ ‘stripes’ represent a unique part of sport dress and help formulate a collective identity among BJJ participants that contributes to the sport’s unique culture.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".