Do You Have the Time?: Modernity, Democracy, and the Beginnings of Daylight Saving Time in Montreal, 1907–1928
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at the most significant public debate over time in Montreal’s history: the beginnings of daylight saving time (1907–1928). Seeing daylight saving time as an example of the disembedding of time from place, the article demonstrates the importance of local social dynamics in the creation of meanings of modernity. Daylight saving time began as an idea to save money and improve people’s lives, though it was ridiculed until the First World War, when it was put in place in Montreal and much of North America and Europe. Yet after the war, it was rejected as a national measure, and subsequently much of North America and eventually even the Island of Montreal turned into a patchwork of time zones. The article argues that the difficult beginnings of daylight saving time in Montreal were due to the unequal benefits of changing the clock, rural–urban tensions, the Canadian federal system, conflicts between ethno-religious institutions, Montreal’s tenacious mayor, and the economic power of businesses to shape time. Cet article se penche sur l’implantation progressive de l’heure avancée (1907–1928), objet du plus important débat public consacré au temps dans l’histoire de Montréal. Voyant dans l’heure avancée un exemple de la dissociation du temps et du lieu, l’article montre l’importance des dynamiques sociales locales dans l’assignation de sens multiples à la modernité. Conçue comme moyen de faire économiser de l’argent et d’améliorer la qualité de vie des gens, l’idée de l’heure avancée fut pourtant ridiculisée jusqu’à la Première Guerre mondiale, alors que Montréal et une grande partie de l’Amérique du Nord et de l’Europe l’ont adoptée. On l’a toutefois rejetée en tant que mesure nationale après la guerre; plus tard, une grande partie de l’Amérique du Nord et même l’île de Montréal finirent par se transformer en une courtepointe de fuseaux horaires. L’article soutient que les débuts laborieux de l’heure avancée à Montréal s’expliquent par les avantages inégaux associés au changement d’heure, les tensions entre ville et campagne, le système fédéral canadien, les conflits entre plusieurs institutions ethnore-ligieuses, la ténacité du maire de Montréal et le pouvoir économique des entreprises de façonner le temps.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".