Scientific Instruments on the move in the North American Magnetic Survey, 1843-1844
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1843-4, John Henry Lefroy conducted a geomagnetic survey of Hudson’s Bay Company territory in British North America. Lefroy and his instruments, guided by French Canadian voyageurs and Indigenous guides moved within the HBC network of forts and outposts. This paper complements and extends historical accounts of Lefroy’s survey by examining how, and how well, Lefroy’s instruments moved on this extensive survey. The recent material turn in the history and historical geography of science provides the framework for a closer reading of the spatial biographies of several of Lefroy’s instruments. Focusing on their varying states of disrepair—and solutions to repair them—this paper not only recaptures the materiality of these instruments, but adds to our understanding of repair and maintenance in the history of survey science. Looking at instruments as objects to be carried and managed also helps illuminate the overlooked role of Indigenous and French Canadian voyageurs in scientific expeditions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".