On the Colonial Genealogy of George Vancouver’s Chart of the North-West Coast of North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to the burgeoning critical literature on the history of cartography by tracking the links between maps, knowledge and power that stemmed from George Vancouver’s survey of the north-west coast of North America. Dispatched to the region by the British in 1791, Vancouver conducted an exhaustive cartographic survey and has been represented as the ‘true discoverer’ of the coast. It is argued here that he created a cartographic space (rather than simply discovered a pre-existing geography), and that his reconnaissance induced and supported a range of imperial and colonial practices. Vancouver’s work played a central role in the creation of a system of imperial inscription that primed the coast for colonial intervention. Attention is paid to the ways in which Vancouver’s project became (and remains) authoritative and influential in imperial and colonial terms: how it turned the coast into an arena of British imperial interest by occluding prior and alternative inscriptions on the land; how a variety of colonial images, projects and associations were derived from his work; and how we might now see his work in relation to the present.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".