Rails and ties : a comparison of late nineteenth-century images of Western railways in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a comparative examination of late nineteenth-century (c. 1869 to 1900) images of railways in the Canadian and American Western landscapes, focusing on differences in how transcontinental railways were depicted in the mountainous Western terrain of each country. It pits Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" about colonization of the American West against Northrop Frye's view of Canadian development, the "garrison mentality" theory, exploring how these theories manifested themselves in the culture of each country, first using nineteenth-century literature, then examining visual examples. Drawing on Gaile McGregor's theory that nineteenth-century representations of the Canadian landscape demonstrate a negative relationship with wilderness, and Barbara Novak's examination of positive aspects of American landscape such as warm light and calm water, the thesis traces how images of railways in the mountains of the West reflect the reactions of Americans and Canadians to landscape. The study concentrates on American railway imagery as evidence of a fulfilling and peaceful relationship with wilderness, and Canadian images as repositories for more fearful reactions. However, it also highlights the complexity of attitudes about Western landscape in both countries by exploring examples that contradict this dichotomy, and examining the ambiguous nature of many landscape components. Artists and photographers discussed include Lucius O'Brien, John A. Fraser, F. M. Bell-Smith, and Oliver Buell in Canada, and Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson in the United States.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".