The Danes of Montreal: The Uses of History and the Meanings of Success
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses a public history project conducted by the author for the Danish Canadians of Montreal in the 1990s. The Danish Canadian community expected that researching their community history would help them recover a more authentic ethnicity and shine a light on their group's unique ethnocultural practices. However, to the community's disappointment, historical research instead revealed a strong trend toward Anglo-conformity, to the point that many Danish Canadians were nearly indistinguishable in Montreal's Anglophone society. In the current climate where the concept of the ethnic mosaic is emphasized in Canada, the history project dealt a blow to their sense of identity and led them to question whether they were ever ethnic at all. In addition to examining the history of a rarely-studied group, this paper explores changing notions of what has constituted immigrant success, and looks at one group's struggle to adapt to the larger society's shifting visions and values surrounding ethnicity. Cet article porte sur un projet d'histoire publique que l'auteur a dirigé dans les années 1990 pour les Canadiens danois de Montréal. Dans leur communauté, on s'attendait à ce qu'une recherche sur leur histoire les aiderait à recouvrer une ethnicité plus authentique et à mettre en lumière les usages ethnoculturels propres à leur groupe. Cependant, à leur grand désappointement, cette recherche a au contraire révélé dans leur histoire une forte tendance à se conformer à la société anglo-montréalaise, au point, pour bien des Canadiens danois, de ne pratiquement pas s'en distinguer. Dans le climat actuel où l'emphase est portée sur la mosaïque ethnique au Canada, ce projet d'histoire a porté un coup à leur sens identitaire et les a amenés à se demander s'ils avaient le moins du monde un caractère ethnique. Dans cet article, tout en examinant l`histoire d'un groupe rarement étudié, nous explorons aussi les notions changeantes de ce qui constitue le succès des immigrants et nous observons la lutte d'un groupe pour s'adapter aux perceptions changeantes et aux valeurs de la société prédominante autour du concept d'ethnicité.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| 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".