Canoes, Modernity, and the Colonial Imagining of Progress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, part photo-essay and part treatise, explores the interplays of history, photographic representation, and archival circulation at work in colonial imaginings of coastal canoes. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, we analyze the archival photographic record in British Columbia to challenge narratives of progress; instead, we insist that Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious” provides a method for reading canoe photos against broader logics of representation and colonial modernity. Our empirical reading of the colonial archives produces a circumscribed account of the representation of the canoe as a persistent technology of Indigenous mobility, labor, and lifeways, but also as a technology, the “disappearance” of which was used to assert narratives of decline and colonial progress. We conclude by suggesting that this article could be read as part of an emerging convergence of critical visual methods within both human geographies of the sea and mobility studies. In this sense, we suggest that the photography-based methods taken here hold potential for growing geographical engagements in marine mobility studies.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".