“Something occult in the science of flag-flying”: School Flags and Educational Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1907 and 1908, the governments of four provinces – Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and British Columbia – introduced policies to encourage the display of flags on public school buildings and grounds. In British Columbia, the question of flag-flying provoked a heated debate, pitting the provincial minister of education, a proponent of the Union Jack, against city school boards that favoured the Canadian Red Ensign. On one level, school flag policies were part of a well-documented patriotic curriculum and suggested the influence of American patriotic practices. The debate in British Columbia underlined the division in Canadian imperialist sentiment between those who favoured a centralized imperial federation and those who saw Canada as an autonomous state within the British Empire. On the other hand, based on a comparative reading of the four provincial policies and the public responses to them, this article contends that the flag-flying controversy, particularly in British Columbia, reflected a process of jurisdictional negotiation as much as a contestation of identity. Drawing upon Alfred Gell's anthropological theory of art, the article suggests that flags draw their power not only from their status as figurative emblems but also from their employment as physical expressions of political agency.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".