Finding "Enlightenment" in the National Archives of Canada: The Commonplace Book of James Sholto Douglas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article chronicles the author’s exploration of the provenance and content of the papers of James Sholto Douglas, a student at the University of Edinburgh during the 1750s. Extrapolating from science historian Bruno Latour’s concept of “ready-made” science, the author argues that the processes of acquisition, organization, and description create a “black box” around the record. Through opening the black box, the archivist gains a better understanding, not only of the documents but also of the process behind their acquisition and description. The James Sholto Douglas papers are an excellent example of the education and thought which existed during the Scottish Enlightenment; they also constitute an excellent case study of how deconstructing a record’s context can bring enlightenment. Résumé Cet article présente l’exploration qu’a faite l’auteur relativement à la provenance et au contenu des documents d’archives laissés par James Sholto Douglas, qui fut étudiant de l’Université d’Edinbugh durant les années 1750. Dans la foulée du concept de science prêt-à-porter (“ready-made” science) mis de l’avant par l’historiendes sciences Bruno Latour, l’auteur tente de démontrer que le processus d’acquisition, d’organisation et de description crée autour des documents une « boîte noire ». Enouvrant cette boîte, l’archiviste peut obtenir une meilleure compréhension, non seulement des documents, mais du processus de leur acquisition et de leur description. Ainsi, les archives de James Sholto Douglas ne sont pas qu’une excellente illustration de l’éducation et de la pensée durant la période des Lumières écossaise, ils permettent également de bien démontrer comment la déconstruction du contexte des documentsest éclairante.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".