Classical meets colonial : an exploration of the travel narratives of George Best
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thesis (M.A.)--Georgetown University, 2008.; Includes bibliographical references. The classical concept of the civilized community, or the civitas, plays a crucial role in understanding how English explorers approached the New World and its peoples, as documented in the travel narratives that chronicle these meetings. The 1578 narrative of George Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northweast, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher... portrays the New World in an Aristotelian context. Because the Elizabethan sense of community was deeply informed by classical texts, Best employs arguments derived from these texts when describing the natives he encounters. He treats the Inuit peoples of what is now Newfoundland according to the principles of classical philosophy, thus excluding them from civilization, as it was understood during the English Renaissance.; I show how Best frames his understanding of community based on the Aristotelian civitas, a classical model that included the role and responsibility of empire, decided the position of the foreigner or slave, and defined what was considered civil. I show classical thought influences how Best treats the concept of civilization, especially as it relates to acquisition, labor, control, and most importantly, the very nature of the Inuit peoples. In addition, Best works in concert with contemporary authors, such as John Stowe and Richard Eden, to define exactly what civilization is. He does this in an effort to achieve his primary objective, the so-called "good life" for those who dwell within civilization, a central tenet of Aristotle's The Politics.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".