"Which not by the Light of Knowledge can Dispel:" Experiencing Blindness in Late Nineteenth-Century North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation contributes to knowledge by expanding our understanding of the way that blindness was defined and experienced in the nineteenth century. Many of our modern ideas of blindness are still shaped by ideas of helplessness and dependency that were described and defined by schools for the blind during their establishment in the late nineteenth century. These schools relied on fundraising that required the posterchild of blindness to be pathetic and helpless without the interventions of school officials and dedicated separate schools for the blind. However, examining the life experiences of blind people counteracts some of this narrative. While those who wrote autobiographies were a minority, they reflect an understanding and lived experience of blindness that is not described in the work of institutions. By examining these autobiographies next to the main narratives of schools for the blind, we raise questions about the effectiveness of dedicated schooling for the blind in the nineteenth century, interrogating and complicating their narratives. By looking at these documents written by the blind themselves, this dissertation also brings to light the community of blind children and adults that has not been well-examined by previous studies.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".