“Freedom” of Information in Canada: Implications for Historical Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a rich and untapped source for historical research that is available to any scholar who is willing to navigate the quagmire of freedom of information legislation (foi) in Canada.2 foi can be used to access records relating to hospitals, mental health institutions, prisons, the military, foreign policy, crown corporations, state agencies, policy development, policing, and much more. Historical records are also not only to be found within archives. Government departments often keep records for decades. In British Columbia (BC), for instance, the Attorney General’s office has kept records on the Human Rights Branch and Commission dating from the 1970s. The only way to access these documents was through foi. Developing familiarity with foi can therefore open a variety of new avenues for research. And yet it is easy to understand why most historians avoid using foi.3 Provincial and federal law is
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 | 0.014 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".