Presidential Address: The Future of the Past in Canada on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the past half-century, the historical profession in Canada has broadened its attention significantly beyond the political, diplomatic, and military concerns that were dominant as recently as the 1950s. This came about in particular by three challenges: from Marxists who insisted on the study of history from the bottom up and on the importance of class and class conflict; from feminists, who focussed attention on the history of women and gender relations; and from scholars who shifted the historical study of politics from political systems to political cultures. Other methodological innovations also helped broaden the study of history, most noticeably the use of statistics in historical analysis. This "opening" of the profession has, however, made it more sectarian and fractious. Moreover, the attention of historians continues to be paid to the western world and is now largely focussed on the last two-and-a-half centuries. A longer and much wider view of human history is necessary. Accordingly, the paper briefly discusses examples drawn from daily life - paper, food, flowers, and the environment - as evidence of the global nature of history and of the importance of the longue durée in it. The paper concludes by arguing that it is essential for historians to enlargen their conception of the past, for by examining much earlier times and very different cultures, we may come to recognize what is distinctive or peculiar about ourselves as well as others. Such imaginative travels through space and time provide a deeply humanizing and liberating experience.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".