On the Level and Role of Literacy in the Secular Self-government of the Irkutsk and Verkhoturye Uyezds in the Last Quarter of the 17th Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a quantitative study of the literacy level of the taxable population of Verkhoturye and Irkutsk uyezds in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. This allows for the comparison of literacy levels in these two Siberian uyezds with those of several regions in European Russia, where comparable studies have already been conducted. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on how many of the participants in elections for secular offices recorded in election acts were able to have a hand in their involvement. A total of 88 “elections” of this kind are analysed. These elections are sourced from the collections of two Russian institutions: the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the Scientific-Historical Archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences. Since not all residents of the uyezds participated in these elections, possible sampling errors are calculated. The calculations show that in the studied uyezds, the literacy rates among urban inhabitants (posadskie) who participated in the elections ranged from 18.8 % (Irkutsk Uyezd) to 31 % (Verkhoturye Uyezd), while among peasants (krestyane), it was around 8 %. However, since more affluent individuals tended to participate in communal meetings, these figures may be somewhat inflated. The study also reveals that the percentage of literate individuals among elders and headmen was not higher or even lower than the overall percentage in the districts. Within a single family, there was usually no more than one literate member, meaning the ability to write was not commonly passed down through generations among the general population.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".