John Carmichael's and Abraham Parsons' Journeys from Aleppo to Basra: Scientific and Commercial Views on the Discourse of Travel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of Edward Said's Orientalism, first published in 1978, scholars began rethinking the intricacies attached to the topic of cross-cultural interaction between Europe and the Orient. Among scholars of European travel writing, this topic has always been contested. Mary Louise Pratt, like Said himself, preferred to argue that the interaction between Europe and its others has always been hegemonic. The proposition set forth here is that such an important topic needs to be rethought. In doing so, the author examines the travel narratives written by two Englishmen who looked east in the second half of the 18th century, John Carmichael and Abraham Parsons. These travellers moved across the Great Syrian Desert Route, which connects Syria with Mesopotamia. The imperial paradigm set forth by Said and Pratt does not work in studying the interactions between these two Englishmen and the Arab space across which they move, for these travellers did not show imperial gestures in their attempts to decode the spa...
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".