A Dialogue among Genres during the Late Eighteenth Century: Conjectural History and Travellers' Textual and Visual Representations of Cultures of the Near East and India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the part played by historical frameworks of thought in the interpretation and representation of unfamiliar cultures.Examining works produced by British travellers to the Near East and India during the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, I argue that a significant and reciprocal relationship was found among the genres of historical writing and travellers' textual and visual representations of distant societies during the late eighteenth century.With social change accompanying rapid growth in commerce and global trade, ideas put forward in the new sub-genre of conjectural history served as a framework in the interpretation of all cultures, whether in Europe or in distant regions of the globe.While conjectural historians used the information provided by travellers in developing a new meta-narrative of history, travellers' representations in turn reflected the historical frameworks of the time.All aspects of societies could be discussed within the framework of stadial theory, including political structures and systems of jurisprudence, social structures, material culture, and architecture.In addition, I argue that representations of distant societies were framed within the European aesthetic categories of central influence during the period, such as the sublime and the picturesque, while at the same time extending the subject matter typically associated with those categories.Further, an interplay of aesthetic and historical frameworks of thought is evident in late eighteenth-century representations of distant cultures.This dissertation offers a close historicizing of a particular moment in Enlightenment thought in light of the many critiques put forward following the late iii eighteenth century concerning the assumptions, methodologies, and theories of the conjectural historians.The comparative method explored by conjectural historians, which encompassed observations spanning centuries as well as continents, led to a highly influential body of thought concerning the interconnections among economic, political, and social structures in societies.The differing types and degrees of distance vii Conjectural History in Visual Form …………………………………………………...
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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 | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".