“The keenest, most intimate analysis”: Profiling Female Stars of the Silent Screen in Photoplay Magazine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1911, Photoplay Magazine was launched in the U.S. as one of the first two periodicals devoted to fans of Hollywood silent cinema, and within a decade became recognized as the leading publication for celebrity news. Photoplay emerged within the broader context of modernism, the period from around 1880 to 1940 defined by a series of movements and manifestos dedicated to artistic, cultural, and political revolutions. While there has been an increasing body of scholarship at the nexus of modernism, cinema, and celebrity culture, to date the relationship between modernism and fan magazines remains surprisingly unstudied, a lacunae this paper redresses. In particular, I draw on Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s mapping of the “new modernist studies” that aims to expand our theoretical and methodological approaches to modernism to include, among other areas, popular culture, mass media, and women’s contributions—points of intersecting relevance to Photoplay. This paper discusses the new genre of the fan magazine as a specifically female space affording historically unprecedented auto/biographical inscriptions of women as professional and public figures via star profiles, interviews, auto/biographical narratives, and photo spreads. Based on archival studies of the original magazines published in the 1910s and 1920s as accessed through the online Media History Digital Library, this paper also foregrounds the “new modernist” turn to digital humanities, one that expands the possibilities for life-writing scholarship today.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".