Espace public, action collective et savoir social : Robert Gourlay et le Statistical Account of Upper Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robert Gourlay’s A Statistical Account of Upper Canada differed radically from all the preceding emigrant guides, travelogues and other descriptive works published about Upper Canada. An overtly political dimension was evident especially in the general introduction, the full title revealing its author’s lofty ambition: resolution of the problem of poverty in Great Britain by massive emigration to under-populated Upper Canada. Developing an overall yet detailed description of conditions in the colony appeared an essential condition for the success of this enterprise. This article traces the origins of Gourlay’s account and shows to what extent its unique char- acter rests in the conjunction between the methods employed to achieve the task at hand, drawing a statistical picture of a given territory, and the grievances, until then unexpressed, of a considerable number of the inhabitants. Neither the political mobilization, nor the content, of Gourlay’s account can be separated from the cognitive forms he employed: first the survey itself, then the rhetorical forms used to give consistency and strength of conviction to the picture presented. It is this task of giving form, by constructing a pattern of material and conceptual facts intended to give territories and communities a basis for comparison, that created the concept of “the social” as knowledge.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".