Racialised Language in Colonial Newspaper Advertisements During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On both sides of the Atlantic, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, newspapers contained advertisements reporting on enslaved people who escaped from their enslavers. These advertisements very frequently contained detailed descriptions of the person who escaped. Though written in derisive language that objectified the enslaved person as chattel, these descriptions are nonetheless teeming with clues about the life, family, skills, ethnic origin, and even desires, of those who sought their freedom by escaping. Through examples of advertisements in English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish, from the newspapers De Curaçaosche Courant , Sanct Thomæ Tidende , Jornal do Commercio , Gazette de la Guadeloupe , and The Quebec Gazette , this chapter shows that racializing language traveled across imperial and colonial borders from very early on, influencing how people of African descent came to be portrayed in our globalized world.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".