Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the use of marriage dot com websites by diasporic Indians in Canada and the U.S. My primary interest is how diasporic Indians practice identity and produce community, and I see these websites as the loci where this is done. My data consists of interviews with 10 North American Indians and a textual analysis of two Indian matrimonial websites (A1 Indian Matrimonials.com and Shaadi.com). From one of these websites, I construct meaning out of 100 online postings. I examine the racialized positioning of diasporic Indians as the 'model minority' in the U.S. and as a 'visible minority' in Canada. I do this (a) to elucidate the 'push' factors that motivate diasporic Indians to seek other Indians as marriage partners, and (b) to show how the 'educated native' of colonial times makes for a diasporic Indian identity that is educated, male and Hindu-Brahmin dominated. I mobilize Brah's notion of the Indian diaspora as a contested, heterogeneous entity, one that is fissured along lines of race, class, caste, nation, and gender. I then comment on the on- and off-line marriage expectations and practices among diasporic Indians and the extent to which they represent a continuation, rupture or negotiation along these axes. What emerges is a complex picture of diasporic Indian identity in which notions of love, family, marriage, community and feminism have points of difference and sameness from Western and Indian notions. In this context matrimonial websites allow a fusion of tradition with technology in which there is a simultaneous opening up of possibilities within highly specific cultural constraints. I explore how hybridity and mobility have different meanings for men and women website users. I also point out the various ways in which examination of matrimonial websites can inform diasporic theory, such as the reformulation of 'Indian-ness', 'homeland' and 'community', and the polyphonic discourse made possible by internet practices.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.006 |
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".