Explorer on the Trans-Canada: Cold War Tourism and the Early Years of the Canadian Highway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article asks what happens when an image of the Canadian nation marketed to American tourists also simultaneously helps produce a vision of highway nationalism in Canada. Starting with a primary discursive analysis of Trans-Canada Highway tourist brochures, I then address three Canadian travelogues from the period—Edward McCourt’s The Road across Canada (1965), Walter Stewart’s series for Star Weekly magazine (1965), and John M. Mitchell’s Coast to Coast across Canada (1967). While the travelogues implicitly replicate the same visions of the colonial adventurer family attached to the brochures—which I contextualize according to Western Cold War middle-class presentations of freedom and consumption—simultaneously McCourt’s and Stewart’s texts foreground discomfort with the tourist industry’s Americanization of nation-space along the highway. By celebrating Western nuclear family values through the image of colonial exploration, while also questioning the integrity of an Americanizing tourist industry, McCourt’s and Stewart’s travelogues—published just a few years after the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1962—realize the way early representations of the highway were marked by a co-opted nationalism where the means of nationalist differentiation simultaneously encouraged a feedback loop of American imperialism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".