The Distant Early Warning Line: Geographies, Infrastructures, and Environments of Warning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was a Cold War era project aimed at providing advanced warning of incoming Soviet attack via the northern periphery of Canada and the United States. The Line was comprised of radar stations across the 69th parallel, spanning from Western Alaska to Baffin Island, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Academic institutions and research labs, private corporations, and military entities collaborated to develop the DEW Line. The domes used to shield the radar from the extreme terrain were designed by architectural icon Buckminster Fuller, who was elaborating upon a symbolic language of security and enclosure. DEW Line designers' use of advanced technology, which they infused into the infrastructural built environment they produced, promised to address newfound anxieties of unboundedness, fueled by a transformed geographic imaginary, through the tactic of warning. After years of research and planning, construction began rapidly in the Spring of 1955 and was completed an astounding two years later. Yet by 1958, missile technology had surpassed the scope of the DEW Line's warning capacity and the sites would endure a slow process of decommissioning over the next forty years. The remnants of the sites have permanently altered the landscape of the Arctic, made all the more apparent by rapidly changing climates. This thesis traces the history of the DEW Line, which remains relatively unknown, in order to examine the delicate intersection of geography, infrastructure, and environment as systems of an ideology of warning. DEW Line advisors imagined the distant north through the promise of warning as an exercise in boundary-making, and as a symbol of a networked future. The DEW Line warns against these potential environmental futures. Though the DEW Line cannot be separated from its history as an agent of warning, that history itself has largely been erased.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".