“Involuntarily We Listen”: Hearing the Aurora Borealis in Nineteenth-Century Arctic Exploration and Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In western science the Aurora Borealis has been a fiercely contested site of inquiry with little agreement as to its nature until the twentieth century. This essay surveys the history of auroral science up to the nineteenth century and then complicates the traditional indigenous/western dichotomy regarding supernatural or anomalous experiences by examining occasions when nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, scientists, and fur traders became enchanted by the Aurora Borealis. Drawing mainly on cases from the period of the British quest for the Northwest Passage through the (now Canadian) Arctic (c.1818-59), it demonstrates how scientific uncertainty allowed for occasions when Arctic explorers, scientists, and other travellers could self-consciously become enchanted by aurorae. If we work from the contention that cycles of re-enchantment rather than sudden disenchantment constitute the modernising process, then we can challenge the notion of a stable scientific observer of the Aurora Borealis.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".