Perfumatic: The Role of Chanel No. 5 in the Construction of Migrant Biographies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will examine the role of Chanel No. 5 as a marker of progress and assimilation for a migrant from the Scottish Highlands to Glasgow, in the early 1960s. It will delineate how use of this perfume was central to the construction of an identity distinct from that which had theoretically been left behind, and consideration will be given to the non-traditional means by which those unfamiliar with, or unwilling to enter, the rarefied world of the department-store perfume hall or specialist perfumery, accessed luxury scents. \n \n Particular attention will be given to the Perfumatic machine, a germolene-pink, coin operated, wall-mounted perfume dispenser that, for six pence a shot, allowed customers to sample one of four branded scents. Invented in Canada by Mercury Steel Corp these machines were located in ladies’ toilets and gas stations throughout the Americas and Western Europe from c.1950. Recalling the coin-operated dispensers of holy water invented by Hero of Alexandria in 215 BC, and the perfume taps depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, these communally accessible dispensers provided many with their only access to perfume. \n \nDrawing upon oral testimony, a case study of the use of Perfumatic machines in the dancehalls of Glasgow during the early 1960s will be developed. Attention will be given to the affective qualities of sampling and sharing perfume within social settings, the multi-sensorial nature of the Perfumatic transaction, the tension that exists between the phenomenological and the culturally constructed in our olfactory preferences, and the central role that perfume can play in the development of our own biographies.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".