The Symbol, The Self, and the Passing of Time: A Transatlantic Analysis of Social and Temporal Variation in 18th to 20th Century Gravestone Symbols
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines gravestones from the 18th to 20th century in Cambridgeshire, England, Perthshire, Scotland, and Ontario, Canada in order to explore the potential relationships between the symbol present on the stone and the identity of the deceased for whom the monument was selected. Using three databases totalling 5,911 monuments across 106 burial locations, this study is the largest of its kind and as such allowed for the robust analysis of the potential relationships between identity, time, and symbols that are frequently explored in mortuary literature but on smaller, more localized scales. Three main questions were addressed: 1) is there a symbolic category that is more associated with a specific identity marker; 2) what is the large-scale change seen in symbolic categories over time; and 3) is there a difference in the two aforementioned questions between broad geographic locations. This research demonstrates that the selection of a symbol for a monument - primarily floral or religious symbols - cannot confidently be attributed to any singular aspect of identity, those being: sex, age, religious affiliation, social class, or immigration status. Further, the sex of the monument purchaser or presence of a religious or non-religious epitaph cannot act as a predictor for the symbol chosen for a gravestone. While certain facets of identity - namely age and social class - can play a role in the patterning of symbol choice, selection is more variable and idiosyncratic than can be predicted by a single facet of a decedent’s (or purchasers’) identity. Change was observed on a comparable timescale between 1856 and 1925 for all three locales, indicating that there is indeed a change in floral and religious symbolic trends from the mid 19th to early 20th century, furthering the evolution seen in mortality symbols from the 18th to 19th centuries, with floral symbols overtaking the prevalence of religious symbols in all locations.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".