Eight Clues: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Life of Arthur Bowler in Slavery and Freedom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her “Eight Clues: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Life of Arthur Bowler in Slavery and in Freedom,” Jane Lancaster pieces together the narrative of an extraordinary odyssey taken by an “ordinary” man from the mid-1760s into the nineteenth century. Taking eight “clues,” as her staring point, she carefully recreates the life of Arthur Bowler, who was captured in West Africa in the 1760s as a teenager, brought to Newport, and enslaved by one of the most prominent citizens in the town. With only scraps of evidence concerning Bowler, and background research on locations and incidents from Newport to Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, the author posits a new way of writing about people who left little evidence about themselves but whose lives are nonetheless crucial to a wider understanding of our history. Jane Lancaster earned a Ph.D. from Brown University, and has taught there and at the R.I. School of Design. She is an independent scholar and has published four books, including Inquire Within, a History of the Providence Athenaeum, and numerous articles on Rhode Island topics with reference to race and gender.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".