Filming the “Northern Front”: The Motion Pictures of the Canadian Arctic Expedition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Review 44 (2017): 427–455The Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE) 1913–1918 was the first Canadian government-sponsored expedition of the Western Arctic. Led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, two teams were to explore the southern and northern areas. With them was Australian cameraman, George Hubert Wilkins, who took still shots and motion pictures of the expedition. The CAE faced challenges from the start and within a few months the Karluk, the ship upon which Stefansson and the majority of the northern team were travelling, got stuck in the ice and later sunk. The CAE was mired in controversy, with the warring expeditions, massive cost overruns, and many deaths. Wilkins filmed thousands of feet of footage and photographs, but this footage was never edited into an official film, and it appears that it was never seen by audiences of the day outside of the Arctic. Placing the CAE official film footage within the context of film in Canada, the First World War, and the controversies surrounding the CAE and its own archival records context, this paper explores the history of this official audiovisual record and attempts to answer the question of why the Canadian government did not use this motion picture record to tell and promote the story of the CAE. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon.https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.019
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".