A Conceptual Framework for Environmental History in Canada's North
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A library's worth of books has been written on the history of northern Canada, most of them narratives, and most of which feature the environment, either as a main protagonist, or at least as a bit player. But with a few honorable exceptions, of which Jamie Bastedo's highly readable book on the Northwest Territories is a recent example, none have analyzed it., There are substantial bodies of both historical and environmental literature pertaining to Canada's north, but the two fields have yet to be combined into a mature and coherent tradition. The formal environmental history of Canada's north is still very much in the developmental stage. This article proposes and discusses critical factors and themes-a preliminary conceptual framework-to be considered in the development of approaches to environmental history in Canada's north. The proposed conceptual framework consists of five elements: i) analysis of existing prominent approaches to environmental history and how they may be adapted to the northern context; 2) discussion and analysis of defining characteristics and prevailing myths about the Canadian North; 3) discussion and analysis of the Turner and Metropolitan theses as they relate to northern environmental history; 4) overview and analysis of major northern environmental trends and events; 5) introduction of four interrelated themes for northern Canadian environmental history. The proposed framework is more selective than comprehensive. Our intent is to review some of the major recurring concepts relating to the Canadian North, and venture some ideas for discussion by environmental historians.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".