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Record W7135032837 · doi:10.1353/vcr.2025.a985003

Coal-Heaving and Logistical Labour

2025· article· en· W7135032837 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Susan Zieger

Bibliographic record

VenueVictorian review · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAmerican Environmental and Regional History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCoalScholarshipProduct (mathematics)Coal miningCoal dustKey (lock)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: The journey of a nineteenth-century piece of coal from the earth to the hearth created many distinctive jobs, from keelmen to basket men, coal whippers, coal backers, coal heavers, coal higglers, and more. In the age of steam, half of all workers handled coal. They reveal the coal regime to be a logistical network. Passing through so many hands, coal was constantly in transit, arriving and departing as it flowed from mines throughout the world and burned in industrial and domestic furnaces, in buildings, and on ships. Studying coal's circulation reveals the regime's reliance on an intensifying mode of logistical power, the forceful strategies by which states, corporations, and militaries manage the geography of capitalism. Throughout the nineteenth century, coal became both a highly sought-after product moved by logistics and a key component of logistical power. Coal was the fuel, and steam the energy, of the nineteenth-century British Empire. While the coal miner has a long, dense history within scholarship focused on working-class production, the coal handler as distributor or logistics worker does not. This essay briefly describes the rise of coal's logistical networks before turning to popular literary and visual representations of coal handlers to illuminate the social logics of coal's energetic regime.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.048
Threshold uncertainty score0.096

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.230 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueVictorian reviewSame topicAmerican Environmental and Regional HistoryFrench-language works237,207