Cultures of power: electrification, politics, and visibility in greater Los Angeles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultures of Power is an environmental history of technology that examines the electrification of greater Los Angeles between 1882 and 1956. Unlike other American cities during this period of urban intensification, greater Los Angeles electrified as it urbanised, allowing the emerging metropolis and its electric systems to determine each other’s form. As real estate speculators, transit barons, agricultural cooperatives, and political reformers appropriated electricity to shape the growing region to their advantage, they created not only a new model of American urbanism, but also a divergent mode of electric system development. Metropolitan Southern California remains largely absent from the historiography of electrification. Likewise, the role of electric power systems in shaping greater Los Angeles’ cultures, politics, and landscapes has received little scholarly attention. By examining greater Los Angeles as the co-created product of its electricity, this thesis not only rewrites familiar narratives of electrification and metropolitan growth, but also poses a larger question about the nature of electrification itself: When does the social process of electrification end? In greater Los Angeles, electricity’s prominence in society long outlasted its novelty in everyday life. For decades after it became ubiquitous, electricity continued to accrete new cultural and political connotations, growing ever more popular as a medium of social expression. This regime of electric visibility structured Angelenos’ social lives, aesthetic visions, and political ideologies, encouraging individuals and institutions alike to pursue their disparate goals by directing, controlling, consuming, and symbolically displaying electricity. Electric visibility, rather than mere novelty, determined electricity’s social prominence in greater Los Angeles. Likewise, the decline of that regime shrank electricity’s range of meanings, and the rise of a countervailing regime of electric invisibility gradually encouraged Angelenos to obscure electricity’s position in culture and the urban landscape. That transit from visibility to invisibility defined the social process of electrification.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".