Reading Friendly Mission in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Friendly Mission generates intense reactions in its readers.Responding with fascination or revulsion, readers repeatedly invoke theexperience of reading it. Several of the authors in this volume narratetheir first engagement with Friendly Mission with the resonant glowof a foundational moment. Writing independently of each other, theseauthors attest to Friendly Missions status as an artefact, a multivalenticon of colonial and postcolonial culture, a meeting place betweenindigenous and non-indigenous people. Like other colonial artefactsforged in conditions characterised by intense curiosity and unequalpower relations, Friendly Mission represents an ambiguous and oftenuncomfortable meeting place. Somewhat akin to local translations ofthe Bible in colonial contexts, Friendly Mission means much to a rangeof constituencies, but its meanings are neither singular, stable norentirely predictable. Reading Robinson explores how we might read Friendly Mission in thetwenty-first century. In doing so, the essays in this volume are symptomatic but not conclusively representative of the multiple readers,readings and interpretations that this textual artefact can generate.Narratives of colonial encounter explorers journals, ethnographies,letters, paintings survive to be fathomed by later generations and, particularly in the former settler colonies (Australia, South Africa,New Zealand and Canada), such accounts of early contact betweenindigenous and invading cultures are crucial to understandings ofnations and their politics. Like the contributions to Reading Robinson,interpretations of texts such as Friendly Mission originate from differingsites within regional, national and international contexts, from variousprivate, public or community readings, as much as from scholarlyanalyses. Friendly Mission is a text which draws together these diversereaders and their interpretations into a community of engagementwith the colonial past and its aftermath.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".