The British visitors’ book and hotel register before and after World War I: texts and contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The British hotel ‘visitors’ book’ was part of a broader constellation of texts in which people voluntarily inscribed personal details, comments, verses, and illustrations. This article surveys the broad textual field within which the visitors’ book was developed before and after World War I and examines how practices were modified and continued over the course of the conflict and beyond. It addresses both the potential and the shortcomings of these documents as historical sources, acknowledging that the information inscribed in them is necessarily fragmented and often hard to evaluate, but can also provide valuable insights into class relations, travel practices, and the movements and experiences of international visitors. It notes that although nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain differed from much of Europe in the sense that it did not make registration a legal requirement for hotel guests, this changed during World War I. It suggests that there were other continuities between the British and Continental European experience when it came to the ways that guests used books for their own purposes, rather than simply being the passive subjects of a registration regime. Finally, it emphasises that the visitors’ book remained resilient in the post-war era in Britain, though it was also enwrapped in a nostalgic discourse as new registration regimes evolved.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".