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Record W75571519

Massachusetts Folk Art: New Immigrants Redefine Tradition

2009· article· en· W75571519 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Maggie Holtzberg

Bibliographic record

VenueHistorical journal of Massachusetts · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMusic History and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsParadeVisual artsHistoryImmigrationSociologyMedia studiesArt historyArtArchaeology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

HJM is pleased to present Editor's Choice - a new feature appearing in each issue where we highlight selections from recent works on Massachusetts history that we feel are especially noteworthy and thought-provoking. Maggie Holtzberg, Manager of the Folk Arts & Heritage Program at the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is the state folklorist. selection is excerpted from her introduction to Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts (2008), a beautifully illustrated volume that celebrates the work of a wide array of living folk artists. Traditional art, passed from person to person within both long-settled and new immigrant communities, involves the shaping of deeply held cultural values into meaningful artistic forms. Keepers of Tradition presents material drawn from eight years of intensive field research by folklorists at the Massachusetts Cultural Council. HJM is pleased to be able to share their innovative work with our readers. I attended the annual Boston Caribbean Carnival for the first time in 2003. Four years later, enormous crowds gather along Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, braving the hot and humid August weather in anticipation of a spectacle. Multiple sound systems on flatbed trucks blast calypso music, and the smell of jerk chicken is in the air. Vendors sell flags and trinkets from Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, and a number of other West Indian islands. No one seems to care that the parade rolls out two to three hours past the time advertised. What the gathering crowd awaits is a succession of mas (masquerading) bands from competing clubs that dance their way the twenty-one-block parade route. A king and queen lead each band, adorned in dazzling handmade costumes of bent wire, steel frames, fabric, feathers, sequins, and glitter. Junior king, junior queen, individuals, and sections of dancing masqueraders complete each club's entourage. The final stop on the parade route is a street stage, where Trinidadian judges observe the celebrants from a viewing station. Many in the Caribbean cultural community live for carnival. This is something that people do out of their hearts. It is a cultural thing from where we came from, says Henry Antoine, executive director of the Caribbean Cultural Festivities Association. More than 600,000 attended Boston's 2007 carnival. Yet outside the participating community, most Bostoniane are completely unaware that a festival of this magnitude in pageantry, beauty, and spirit takes place in their own city. Bandleaders tell me it takes considerable time and substantial resources to participate in carnival. Preparations begin in late May and lead right up to the week of carnival. Lacking roomier facilities, most local clubs do the work of conceptualizing, designing, and constructing costumes in basements and backyards. . . . From the street it would be difficult to know that inside the basement of this house fabulous carnival costumes are constructed every year. Similarly hidden is the Canadian-American Club in Watertown. Known by insiders as the Can-Am, the club is housed in a nondescript brick and glass-tiled building on Arlington Street. Each month the club hosts dances, seisiuns (music jam sessions), and concerts where an older crowd goes to socialize, listen to music, and dance. Smoking is still allowed downstairs. There is a cash bar but one can also find tea (really more a meal of sandwiches and cake) for sale in a room adjacent to the dance hall. never know who might drop in from down home.1 Aside from a small sign outside the Canadian- American Club building, there is nothing to let you know what goes on inside. But if you happen by on a Saturday night and the door is open, you will hear the driving sounds of Cape Breton strathspeys and reels played on fiddle, guitar, accordion, and piano. You hear the feet. The building practically pulses, says Marcia Palmater, host of Boston radio station WUMB. …

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)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.035
Threshold uncertainty score0.107

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0100.005
Scholarly communication0.0070.005
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0030.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0320.003

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 head0.033
GPT teacher head0.215
Teacher spread0.182 · 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 designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

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Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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