The Voice of the Child Cries Out Against You: The 1912 Montreal Child Welfare Exhibition in its North American and Transnational Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the 1912 Montreal Child Welfare Exhibition as part of a transnational public-education project that provided tools for the promotion of public health, child welfare, and the prevention of child and infant mortality in North America. During the Progressive Era, the population of cities increased and urban living conditions became a major concern for reformers, who were especially worried about a vulnerable group within this population: children. Child welfare exhibitions became an important component of the child-saving movement in the early 1910s, developed in response to the dangers and risks of the cities, as well as the alarming childhood and infant mortality rates. They were grassroots initiatives organized by communities seeking to share new education methods and to explain their philanthropic work around children’s well-being. The Montreal exhibition was based on an American model and largely influenced by the New York and Chicago exhibitions held the year before. Inviting readers on a virtual tour of the 1912 exhibition, the dissertation examines the different thematic sections of the Montreal event, which dealt in turn with the following child-related issues: health, housing and the city environment; education and religious training; recreation; philanthropy; juvenile court; and industrial conditions. The omnipresence of children in urban setting and the particular salience of the mother's responsibility are emphasized throughout the chapters. In Montreal, reformers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds put their differences aside in this endeavor, designing and presenting a successful exhibition visited by over three hundred thousand people. The transnational lens shows that reformers worked together across countries and shared elite ideologies, beliefs, values, and attitudes, but also concepts of public health, moral and social regulation, nationalism, scientific motherhood, and materials for child welfare exhibitions. This study asserts that this heterogenous group had conflicting views regarding the origins of child welfare problems, blaming mothers or poverty, and proposed contrasting solutions in the exhibition materials. Overall, the thesis argues that the visual and experiential elements of the exhibition were central to the choice of this medium for the transnational public-education project on child welfare.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".