Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 1890 Robert Louis Stevenson embarked upon his third Pacific Island cruise aboard the SS Janet Nicoll. During the next four months, the travel writer made several stops in the Cook Islands, including the atoll of Penrhyn or Togarewa (now Tongareva), where he learned about Penrhyn’s leprasorium. This article examines two of Stevenson’s rarely examined pieces concerning Penrhyn and discusses Stevenson’s engagement with leprosy in the Pacific, its aetiology and effects, with respect to Polynesian cultural habits and customary practice, and to the colonial discourse on contagion. In his article ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ (New York Sun), Stevenson hypothesized that a single Hawaiian leper had escaped from Kalaupapa and reached the shores of Penrhyn. Stevenson’s lament about the insidious Hawaiian leper’s effects on the local population was accompanied by his photographic illustration of Penrhyn children who, throughout the course of the article, came to embody the inevitable destruction of a Pacific population. Just as Stevenson’s vivid account of his family’s visit to Penrhyn is woven around the presence of the singing girls, the photograph depicting them serves as a launching point for my discussion of Stevenson’s representation of leprosy in both ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ and in the related essay entitled ‘Talofa, Togarewa!’ (‘Goodbye, Togarewa!’). The latter was conceived for publication in the London Missionary’s Samoan-language magazine O Le Sulu Samoa (Samoan Torch). In both ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ and ‘Talofa, Togarewa!’, the singing girls function as narrative prompts for Stevenson’s detailed account of the link between leprosy and the Hawaiian Islands, but they – over the course of both texts – also become symbols for all that is destroyed (youth, innocence, joy, morality and bodily and spiritual health) through lethal contagion.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".