Georgic Ideals and Claims of Entitlement in the Life Writing of Alberta Settlers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My study focuses on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of seven British and Anglo-Canadian pioneers who settled in southern Alberta to establish farms and ranches. An exploration of these texts reveals language patterns pertaining to agriculture and animal husbandry practices. The figure of the horse has notable presence in the diaries and memoirs, as does an ethic of stewardship modelled in Virgil’s Georgics. The authors of the diaries and letters recorded their georgic practices at the time of settlement, while the memoirists recollected stories of pioneer farming later, in georgic literary style. I compare sub-literary and literary depictions of settlement to explore the ways in which settlers transform literal experiences into literary expression, specifically, into utopian and frontier myths in which they emphasize their labour, struggles, and achievement. Significantly, all of these authors downplay the efforts of hired hands, whose help ensured the success of their agricultural operations. Documenting their progress, moreover, the authors enacted or re-enacted the erasure of Indigenous culture and its replacement by the Anglo-Canadian culture that dominated the first prairie communities in Alberta. The purpose of my study is to reveal these manuscripts as colonial discourses that support the writers’ claims of entitlement to prairie land.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".