GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCE AND CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE: WRITING ABOUT CHINA IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To what extent is the production of knowledge of foreign cultures affected by geographical distance? This article explores the porous boundaries between ethnography, geography and fiction in the narrative Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia (1860) by the Colombian Nicolás Tanco Armero. A rare document of exchange between antipodal regions of the planet in the nineteenth century, Viaje… combines the language of the coolie trade, tourist guidebooks and journals of pilgrimage, opening a form of writing about China that considers the rhetorical strategies of peripheral epistemologies. This text inquires into the forms of universalism that prevail over local histories in discussions of modernity, and casts fresh light on discourses of orientalism produced from other allegedly exotic geographies. My claim is that Viaje… evidences a form of writing of China where national identity is at the service of a cosmopolitan form of identification. Geographically, imaginatively and ethically, China becomes a figurative region that transcends the Latin American’s point of enunciation and, in turn, redefines the traveler subjectivity in relation to different forms of production of geographic knowledge: cartography, tourism and pilgrimage.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".