Women's Agency in Upper Canada: Prescott's Board of Police Record, 1830-1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Prescott Board of Police was established in 1834 to resolve disputes brought forward by local citizens under the town’s bylaws. The cases recorded in the Minute Book of the Board of Police for Prescott thus constitute an unparalleled source of information on many aspects of Upper Canadian life, recording standards for acceptable community behaviour on such matters as control of livestock, health regulations, road maintenance, keeping the sabbath, licensing alcohol and entertainment, and the type of language permitted in public space. In the early years, since only small fines resulted from charges brought to the Board, it was commonly used by lower-class women for settling personal disputes or avenging insults to their reputation. By 1850 fines had become severe and prosecutions for sexual immorality and drunkenness more common, and the Prescott Board of Police transformed from a forum for lower-class women’s agency into an institution used by the town fathers to enforce a new, middle-class, gendered moral code.
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 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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".