Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two student researchers assisted me in transcribing and contextualizing primary source documents related to a remarkable court case, Enos v. Sowle (1860). In the winter of that year, a teenage cabin boy (Manuel Enos) contracted to an American whale ship, the Montreal, charged Captain Nathaniel Sowle with repeated counts of sexual abuse. After a closed hearing that lasted several days, the court not only found the captain guilty, they fined him $2,500, a tremendous sum for the time.1 With over 200 pages of handwritten testimony and several more hundred pages of related government correspondence, this court case offers an extremely rare window into the roles of sex and sexuality on board American whaling ships, and, by extension, the implementation of law and order in the maritime world of the nineteenth century. While scholars have long known same-sex sexual relations must have occurred aboard these vessels, the dearth of available evidence has severely limited our ability to learn more about such liaisons. The primary aim of this student-faculty collaborative project was thus to process hundreds of pages of primary source materials to explore what this trial might reveal about issues of sexuality and race, as well as the reach of state authority in the Pacific whaling fleet. 1Judgment of Justice Robertson, Dec. 11, 1860, Case 35, Enos v. Sowle, Series 001, Admiralty Records of First Circuit Court, Box 3, Hawaiian State Archives, Honolulu, Hawaii.
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 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 | 0.020 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.574 | 0.436 |
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".