"The Natchez Database of Free People of Color, 1779-1865."
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Natchez Database of Free People of Color (NDFPC) contains data about Natchez, Mississippi’s free Black community during the Spanish era (1779-1795) and after the US acquired it in 1796 until 1865. The Database records the name of every free black individual who surfaced in the record, and diligent attention was paid to entering values like gender, age, race, property ownership, occupation, literacy, experiences of violence, among many others (53 in total) in the database. The companion to the NDFPC is the Natchez Index of Free Individuals and Families of Color, which is an approximately 500-page Word document that archives transcriptions of records on the 1,018 free Black individuals who lived or stayed in Natchez during those years. It is organized alphabetically by surname when known or by first name. The idea behind the continuing expansion and digitalization of the Database and Index is the desire to disseminate the research to other scholars of enslaved and free people of color and link this project with data from different geographical regions, an endeavor that gives scholars working on transnational, comparative studies of freedom quick access to relevant demographic information. But perhaps most importantly, it will be a public platform which will provide resources to the descendent community who may be doing genealogical work to access records on their ancestors.
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.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.056 | 0.036 |
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".