The Surveyor's Model of the World: The Uses and Abuses of History in Introductory Surveying Textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of geographical literature has examined the importance of power relations in the history of surveying and mapping, yet such studies have been virtually ignored by the engineering establishment and the authors of introductory surveying textbooks, many of whom are professional engineers. The present study seeks to compare the "textbook histories" of surveying with recent analyses of surveying as a mechanism of social control. The study is based on a selection of 15 US surveying textbooks published over the last century and argues that current textbook accounts of the history of surveying are both Eurocentric and nationalistic - legitimizing the state while at the same time denying the significance of power. A number of historiographic changes are proposed as a means of improving the quality of textbook histories of surveying, including (1) a shift away from the search for ancient "origins" and more emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (2) an acknowledgement of the imperial legacy of surveying and mapping, and (3) a greater sensitivity to the contested power relations that form the basis of the historical and contemporary practice of surveying and mapping.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".