Crafting Quebec’s Seventeenth-Century Past: A Birch Bark Letter by Twentieth-Century Hospitalières
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines a letter written by the Quebec City Hospitalières to the Society of Jesus in 1925. Written on birch bark, the letter stands out from other notes of congratulation received by the city’s Jesuits on the tercentenary of their arrival at Quebec. Drawing on queer theory ― in particular, Sara Ahmed’s theory of “affective economies” ― this article analyses the ways in which this letter was crafted in order to shape feelings about ― and to colonize ― the seventeenth-century past. Feelings, Ahmed argues, are not “in” objects, but are created through “circulation.” As an object for which circulation is embedded in its purpose, the Hospitalières’ letter provides a useful case study for the examination of the ways in which encounters with objects could shape feeling in twentieth-century Quebec. While the Hospitalières claimed to be able to feel the seventeenth-century past ― and sought to evoke these feelings in the letter’s recipients ― they were, in fact, crafting a feeling for it.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".