Sanitary Conveniences and the Retreat of the Frontier: Vancouver, 1886-1926
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a Canadian Pacific Railway boom town superimposed on the sawmill village of Granville, Vancouver was born with characteristics of both urban and frontier societies.Some early residents were fresh off the train from eastern metropolitan centres; others were habituated to life at the edge of settlement.For example, the first mayor had arrived from Winnipeg by way of San Francisco only a few months before his election ( 1886 ), but the first city council also included a carpenter who had been in the Burrard Inlet area intermittently since 1862.Within three years, Vancouver displayed material attributes of a pleasant and progressive city : initial segments of sewerage and water works, electric street lighting, tree-planted boulevards, and a park system ; in 1890, it inaugurated one of Canada's first electric street railways.On the other hand, its disproportionately male population in those years ( 1891 census: 65 per cent) gave it a frontier flavour to which an abundance of saloons and brothels contributed, along with the comparatively unrefined toilet behaviour which concerns us here.This essay traces the provision of non-residential toilet facilities in Vancouver as indicative of the gradual retreat of frontier behaviour there.The period covered is from the foundation of the city in 1886 up to 1926, by which time frontier toilet behaviour was clearly no longer generally acceptable.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".