Raciological thought in Victorian culture : a study in imperial dissemination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis revives the term raciology to describe collectively the literature which emanated out of philological ethnology, that is, out of the studies of man inspired by the rapid advances in linguistic science in the early nineteeenth century. Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture is divided into two parts: it examines the development and dissemination of nineteenth-century raciological knowledge in the works of celebrated philologists and anthropologists; and then investigates typical features of raciological discourse in Victorian and Victorian Canadian culture. It views this regional British literature as a field for the political and educational deployment of British raciological conceptions, and comments on some of the implications of the circulation of raciological doctrine. My argument begins with discussion of the often overlooked celebrity and authority of philologists in Victorian culture, tracing the derivation from philology of raciological typologies which established the raciological associations of terms like "Britons," "Anglo-Saxons," and "Teutons" during the early and middle-Victorian periods. An important aspect of the thesis is a re-evaluation of the influence of Friedrich Max Muller, the most influential comparative philologist and mythologist in the Victorian world. I argue that his use of etymological study for archaeological data greatly contributed to the rapid dissemination of raciological thought among the educated and educating classes. The first part of the thesis concludes with discussion of issues which animated raciological discourse. The second part follows the dissemination of Victorian raciological thought to Canada, and illustrates its effects in an imperial context. It demonstrates the use of raciology in establishing Canada's legitimacy as a British nation, and documents the place of raciology in establishing the authenticity of Canadian continuity with a British culture running into deep antiquity. After discussing neglected raciological aspects of several important Victorian Canadian source works, it goes on to outline the importance of raciological mythology to the preservation of the Dominion from American annexation and Fenian incursion. My epilogue briefly documents the decline of raciological thought in Britain after the 1890s. By investigating numerous neglected Victorian sources, Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture establishes raciology as an important element in Victorian political-and, in particular, nationalist-thinking.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".