<i>The Little Mermaid</i> and little Black girls
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although underrepresentation in popular media remains an urgent area of inquiry, in recent years mass-media productions have created more representative images for youth of color. The Little Mermaid ’s 2023 remake marks the second Black actress (Halle Bailey) to assume the role of a princess in a live-action production in a Disney film, and the first Black performer of a princess role in a live-action theatrical release. Since media consumption and images greatly influence youth and their identity development, The Little Mermaid live-action film is an historic event for multiple generations of Black women and girls. This multi-study project uses qualitative mixed-method research to examine how this film’s representation impacts Black girls and their mothers in the US Deep South. Using sista circle methodology (SCM) with Black girls from the third to seventh grades and their mothers/aunts following a group screening, and qualitative survey data, we explore how a Black Disney princess in a fantastic underwater world engages and disrupts Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s Dark Fantastic Cycle. Specifically, this article seeks to examine two main research questions: 1) how is Ariel reimagined as a Black princess? and (2) how are Black daughters and mothers engaging with this film with regards to their own complex identities?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it