The Representation of Newfoundland in Nineteenth-Century French Travel Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE IDEA OF NEWFOUNDLAND as a place is, for the most part, based upon its repre-sentation in British texts associated with the North Atlantic fishery, by means of an imperial discourse expressed by seafarers, army officers, clergymen, physicians, explorers and colonial administrators linked to the British régime. Newfoundland has been formed as a locale by what Edward Said attributes to authority, a phenom-enon that establishes canons of taste and value and transmits traditions and percep-tions.1 While Newfoundland is not an imaginary place, our idea of it has been shaped by histories, letters and memoirs, by what Hayden White refers to as “fic-tions of factual representation, ” based upon the notion that facts do not speak for themselves but that the historian or chronicler fashions them into a discursive whole.2 French writing in the nineteenth century, therefore, widens the frame of ref-erence, for it incorporates a separate discourse and introduces a notion of New-foundland related not to imperial authority but to the lives of the people. We shall now examine a variety of French visitors associated with the overseas fishery to determine the variety of travel literature and their different perspectives so as to provide an opportunity for further exploration. Thus, our purpose is not to under-take a theoretical analysis of these relatively unknown works but, rather, to bring them to the attention of travel literature scholars and highlight their research po-tential. Let us begin in 1713. By signing the Treaty of Utrecht, the French abandoned Acadia, the Hudson Bay territories and the island of Newfoundland but preserved the right to catch and dry fish for six months of the year on the section of the west
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".