A New Prosopography: The Enumerators of the 1891 Census in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who were the enumerators and to what degree were they representative of the wider Ontario population in 1891? What potential influence did the selection of enumerators have on the accuracy and bias of the census returns? We address these questions by considering the residence and socioeconomic characteristics of Ontario enumerators, as identified in their own census returns, in relation to a new 5 percent sample of the entire Ontario population. We found that the census commissioners were largely successful in finding men they deemed trustworthy and reliable to serve as enumerators: married, middle-aged heads of household with ties to their communities. These men were broadly representative of the rest of 1891 Ontario, especially the large class of independent farmers and tradesmen in the countryside and the growing middle class in the towns and cities. However, communities composed of ethnic or religious minorities including French-Canadian Catholics and Lutherans often had an enumerator who shared their language and culture. The 1891 census was not objective and was certainly not perfect, but the Dominion was successful in improving and standardizing pre-Confederation census-taking practices. The selection of more competent, knowledgeable, and representative enumerators was a key component of that success.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".