Contextualizing the apparatus : film in the turn-of-the-century Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s Consumers guide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sears, Roebuck & CO. 1898 Consumers Guide \nPublished by America and Canada’s largest mail order company, the 10.8 x 8.5 inches \n(27.4 x 21.6 cm), 1120-page catalog was filled with illustrations, descriptions, and \ntestimonials regarding every possible commodity, including motion-picture-related \nitems. Several million copies per year found their way to farms and small towns across \nthe continent. The Consumers Guide offered projectors and films for sale, itemizing \nthe medium’s technological requirements, its business models, and programming \npossibilities for the general public. It provides a highly detailed documentation of \nwhat the turn-of-the-century public could be expected to know about the film medium \nshortly after its birth. \nTheoretical Framing : \nA catalog can be an apparatus of sorts, as a causal agent and source of documentation \nand evidence. The 1898 Sears Consumers Guide helped to position the medium of film \nin the imagination of millions of readers, locating it as a technology, business opportunity, and source of information and entertainment. From a 21st-century perspective, it offers evidence regarding the intricate relationship of technology and text, of \nthe material conditions facing those who would use the medium, and of the period’s \ncross-media endeavors. The Consumers Guide is an apparatus for understanding the \nhorizon of expectations that greeted the new medium of motion pictures.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.006 |
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".