Sensory Encounters on Martha’s Vineyard: Native American Deathways in Colonial New England Around 1700
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On Martha’s Vineyard there was a particularly long-lasting Puritan mission among the Native Americans. This article examines how the clergy there attempted to apply the Puritan ideal of the “visible saints” to the converted Indians and what implications Christianity should have had for their sensory experiences and sensual forms of expression. In a first step, the normative requirements that defined Puritanism around 1700 will be explained on the basis of Cotton Mather’s theology. Dealing with death and dying served as a litmus test for a successful “change of heart.” Using the example of the promotional treatise Indian Converts (1727) by the third-generation missionary Experience Mayhew, who was active on Martha’s Vineyard, the article explores the question of how the senses of hearing and seeing were evaluated in this context. Reading this source against the grain reveals normative conflicts and ambivalences that can deepen our understanding of how coexistence was enabled and to what extent sensory agency was possible for the Native Americans.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".