Gregory Nobles. John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John James Audubon was the first American painter of truly international stature, despite the fact that he limited himself to birds and, at the end of his career, quadrupeds. He was also one of the most important American nature writers, producing over three thousand pages of ornithological essays, filled with close observations on bird behavior, which became one of the primary sources for Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871). Audubon’s conception of America, as Gregory Nobles points out, followed the routes the birds traveled; thus, it included Labrador as well as Louisiana, the state where Audubon would often (falsely) claim he was born. Perhaps ironically, biographers and even the handful of academic scholars who have written about Audubon have inevitably tried to fit him into narrowly nationalistic frameworks. From Francis Hobart Herrick’s still unsurpassed Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time (1917) to the widely read popular biography John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes (2004), Audubon time and again is made to rise from inauspicious, foreign beginnings (hampered as he was by his illegitimate birth and lack of formal training) to the glory of national scientific and entrepreneurial success. Nobles’s John James Audubon, beautifully produced by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is no exception. It delivers, competently and fluently, what its subtitle promises—an investigation of Audubon’s personal brand, the “American Woodsman.” Unlike other writers, Nobles is relatively unconcerned about Audubon’s mass killings of birds. “Audubon knew that proof lay in a pile of carcasses,” he states succinctly (165). As the emerging American scientific establishment, represented most prominently by George Ord and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, tried to discredit him, Audubon, for whom a connection with ordinary American citizens mattered more than the approbation of his peers, sought recourse in his own version of rugged, gun-toting frontier masculinity.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.013 |
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".