An Accidental Archive of the Old Durham Road: Reclaiming a Black Pioneer Settlement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers how the land might be utilized as an archive of a “disappeared” historic community of black settlers in Grey County, Ontario. The paucity of resources about this community (beyond the censuses that marked race as a category), as well as past and current efforts to deny its existence, are considered. Drawing on Jonathan Silin’s notion of teacher as “accidental archivist,”[1] the article explores how the land along the Old Durham Road, where these settlers lived, might be considered an “accidental archive.” Three “evidences” of the settlement are taken up: wild apple trees, a stone foundation, and crockery shards from a kitchen midden. Through seasonal changes, the land both hides and reveals, suggesting both the literal and the metaphoric “absent presence” of this historic community. In closing, the article explores how this archive might best be accessed. RÉSUMÉCet article se penche sur la manière dont des terres pourraient servir d’archives à une communauté historique « disparue » de colons noirs du comté de Grey, en Ontario. L’article considère la pénurie de ressources au sujet de cette communauté (au-delà des recensements qui notaient la race comme catégorie), ainsi que les efforts passés et présents pour nier son existence. En s’inspirant de la pensée de Jonathan Silin au sujet de l’enseignant comme « archiviste accidentel »,1 cet article explore comment les terres le long du chemin Old Durham, où ces colons ont vécu, pourraient être considérées comme des « archives accidentelles ».[1] Trois « preuves » de l’établissement sont examinées : des pommiers sauvages, une fondation de pierre et des tessons de faïence provenant d’un tas d’ordures de cuisine. Avec le changement des saisons, les terres cachent et révèlent, suggérant à la fois la « présence absente » littérale et métaphorique de cette communauté historique. En terminant, cet article examine la meilleure façon d’avoir accès à ces archives.[1] Jonathan Silin, “The Teacher as Accidental Archivist,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 15, no. 2 (April 2014): 133–42.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".