Ethnography and armchair visual artistry: Charles Nicolas Cochin’s illustrations of the <i>Histoire générale des voyages</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From 1746 to 1759, the abbé Prévost produced the Histoire générale des voyages, a collection of voyages and travels, partially translated from the English collection A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels. Mostly known as the author of the novel Manon Lescaut (1731), Prévost was also recognised for his penmanship, his taste for travel adventures and for his scholarly translations of historical books. This article focuses on the involvement of French artist Charles-Nicolas Cochin in undertaking several images for the French collection. Cochin recycled the existing images from the English edition but also drew new illustrations for previously unillustrated portions of the text, renewing the text–image relationships at work. The comparison of both texts reveals cultural differences pertaining to the visual aesthetics of travel illustrations which, in turn, formed the basis for different representations of the faraway.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".