The Politics of Selection: The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and the Imperial Commemoration of Canadian History, 1919-1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a preliminary inquiry into the selection process used by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) in making its recommendations for the national historic significance of sites, events and individuals between 1919 and 1950. It argues that, while the HSMBC was composed of dedicated and leading figures in the field of Canadian history, Board members operated for its first 30 years almost exclusively as a Victorian gentlemen’s club, without a system of checks and balances. The ideological dominance of the British imperial mindset influenced Board members’ field of historical interests as well as their recommendation for national historic designations of sites, events or individuals. These points will be illustrated by examining the origins and the operations of the HSMBC between 1919 and 1950, and the recommendations for national historic designation presented to the HSMBC by two prominent Board members: Brigadier General Ernest Cruikshank and Dr. John Clarence Webster.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".