“Lord, Save Us from the Et Cetera of the Notary”: Archival Appraisal, Local Custom, and Colonial Law
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the timeless legal and archival challenge to appraise, preserve, and reference unwritten, local custom. In the history of Western law and public archives, we find moments when the disciplines have combined to record and represent local custom. In these periods, methods were refined to capture and embed diverse local customs in the enfolding legal and political values of a dominant order. These periods highlight a local community’s identity and culture and offer a view of the enfolding ideological parameters and assimilating processes used to represent local values. I consider two examples of this legal and archival rendition of local culture: the codification of unwritten, local customary law in the French code civil and the Supreme Court of Canada’s tentative recognition of the probative value of traditional, unwritten Aboriginal custom. The comparison demonstrates that professional models of records appraisal have not adapted well to contemporary records-creating environments of dynamic, collaborative media and the distributed governance and interrelated cultural authorities of our socially diverse constitution. Contemporary archival appraisal continues to privilege textual evidence and frame appraisal decisions within structured, hierarchical juridical models of governance and authority. These modernist interpretive appraisal elements attenuate the archival representation of multiple constituencies of Canadian society. Both legal and archival disciplines require an interpretive model to represent non-textual evidence of the contingent, the particular, the local, and the inductive within the interpretive framework of local social sanction. RESUME Cet article se penche sur l’eternel defi legal et archivistique d’evaluer, de conserver et de rendre accessible les us et coutumes locales non ecrites. Dans l’histoire du droit et des archives publiques de l’Occident, on trouve des moments ou les disciplines ont collabore pour documenter et representer les coutumes locales. A ces moments, certaines methodes ont ete mises au point pour capter et enchâsser dans les valeurs legales et politiques de l’ordre dominant diverses coutumes locales. Ces periodes mettent l’accent sur l’identite et la culture d’une communaute locale et permettent une vue d’ensemble des parametres ideologiques englobants et des processus d’assimilation qui sont utilises pour representer les valeurs locales. J’examine deux exemples de cette interpretation legale et archivistique de la culture locale : la codification du droit coutumier local non ecrit dans le code civil francais et la reconnaissance provisoire par la Cour supreme du Canada de la valeur probante des coutumes autochtones traditionnelles et non ecrites. Cette comparaison montre que les modeles professionnels d’evaluation archivistique ne sont pas bien adaptes aux environnements contemporains de creation de documents qui comprennent le role des medias collaboratifs et dynamiques, ainsi qu’a la gouvernance partagee et aux liens etroits des autorites culturelles de notre constitution socialement diversifiee. L’evaluation archivistique contemporaine continue a privilegier la valeur de preuve textuelle et a formuler des decisions d’acquisition qui cadrent bien avec les modeles juridiques bien structures et hierarchiques de la gouvernance et de l’autorite. Ces elements interpretatifs modernistes du processus d’evaluation reduisent la representation archivistique de plusieurs groupes representatifs de la societe canadienne. Les disciplines legales et archivistiques requierent un modele interpretatif capable de representer les preuves non-textuelles de groupes representatifs, de particuliers, de regions et de l’inference dans le cadre d’interpretation des sanctions sociales locales.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it