Black Nerds Pleasure Reading Choices: Race, Representation and Prosocial Skills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Not much is known about what African Canadian Black youth read for pleasure. The subject of this study is a group of young people who belong to the Black nerd subculture (aka Blerds) of urban Toronto. The participants are between 16 and 25 years of age and identify as predominantly working class. Research conducted with this group reveals that graphic novels, fan fiction, traditional comics and webcomics are their main reading choices. Participatory research is used to understand how these texts are read and their implications for race, representation and prosocial skills and values. \nAlthough there are common threads among all Blerds, this study adopts and adapts youth subcultural theory and intersectional theory to understand the unique interest, sense of belonging, morals and values of Blerds in the specific location of urban Toronto. Since research on the Blerd subculture is limited, the study's findings provide insights into the Blerd culture and Black youth's perspectives about living in multiracial, multicultural Toronto.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".