Ramsay Cook: A Life in History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ramsay Cook (1931–2016) was a respected scholar and a much-loved friend whose scholarship and graduate supervision helped a new generation of historians rewrite the history of Canada. To mark his life and career, the Canadian Historical Association hosted a round table at its 2017 annual meeting which provided the basis for the short essays in this “Life in History” section dedicated to Cook. Donald Wright uses Barker Fairley’s portrait of a young Ramsay Cook as a starting point to consider his career and its animating themes. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, Greg Kealey studied with Cook; a few years later, he and Cook discovered a shared interest in the radical Toronto journalist Phillips Thompson, also known as Jimuel Briggs. One of “Ramsay’s girls,” Franca Iacovetta remembers a generous doctoral thesis supervisor who took an active interest in not only her scholarship but the scholarship of a number of feminist historians. Strictly speaking, Adele Perry was not Cook’s doctoral student, but as a graduate student at York University, she appreciated his capacious understanding of Canadian history and his intellectual commitment to historical analysis unhooked from the yoke of nationalism. Robert Fraser was neither Cook’s student nor his university colleague, but he worked closely with him at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (dcb) and came to admire his leadership and his commitment to scholarship during a difficult moment in the dcb’s history.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".