MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2138501534 · doi:10.1017/s1060150307051698

“FAC-SIMILES OF NATURE”: VICTORIAN WAX FLOWER MODELLING

2007· article· en· W2138501534 on OpenAlexaff
Ann B. Shteir

Bibliographic record

VenueVictorian Literature and Culture · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Natural History
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArtQueen (butterfly)Art historyHorticultureBiologyBotany

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

THE GIGANTIC WATER LILY WHOSEseeds were brought to England from the Amazon in 1847 had been sighted a decade earlier in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk and described in 1837. NamedVictoria regiaand now known asVictoria amazonica, the spectacular specimen had huge leaves five feet in diameter and seventeen feet in circumference, and flowers more than twelve inches in diameter. Germination of the seeds took some time, but in 1849 three plants developed, and the race was on to propagate the first flower. The triumphal first bud in England opened in early November 1849, its flower measuring three feet in circumference, at the Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire where the gardener and landscape architect, Joseph Paxton, had designed a greenhouse and water tanks for this purpose; Margaret Darby has detailed the precise attention that Paxton gave to the levels of light, moisture, and heat so as to approximate the plant's native habitat. TheVictoria regiaproduced 126 large, beautiful, and fragrant white and pink tinted flowers. It was a popular wonder and received clamorous public attention for its size, beauty, and surprising strength. Paxton presented a leaf and flower to the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, and a well-known engraving in theIllustrated London News, November 17, 1849, showed Paxton's eight-year old daughter Annie standing on one of the leaves. Publication in 1851 ofVictoria Regia; or Illustrations of the Royal Water-Lilywith life-sized drawings and lithographs by Walter Hood Fitch and descriptions by the botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker brought further celebrity to the plant. Soon after, John and Horatio Mintorn, wax flower artists in London, were commissioned to make a model of the flower of this huge plant in different stages of development – “from the large and bristly bud to the white opening petals, and the full-blown flower, in its beautiful variegation of form and tint” (theDaily NewsJuly 17, 1850). Exhibition of the wax model generated wide press coverage about the “fac-simile…of one of the most curious botanical phenomenon of the present age” (Mintorn 1844, ii-iii).

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.999
Threshold uncertainty score0.064

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0190.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.206
Teacher spread0.198 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations11
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueVictorian Literature and CultureSame topicHistory of Science and Natural HistoryFrench-language works237,207