Bibliographic record
Abstract
I discuss the culture of accurate and dispassionate mensuration in an Arctic that was, for the first time, predictably attainable—a technologized Arctic near enough to be reached and subjected to experiment. My purpose is to develop, in the context of the discourse of polar exploration and the British responses to that discourse made by poets and fiction writers, recent arguments about the culture of scientific experiment and the so-called rise of “objectivity” that have been made by historians of science. The effect of these arguments has been to suggest that a mutually reinforcing objectification of experiment narrative and establishment of professional institutions set nineteenth century science apart from natural philosophy as practised by amateur eighteenth-century gentlemen—Erasmus Darwin being a typical gentleman of that kind. Here, I suggest that the extreme regions of the poles not only challenged the authority of accurate observation as a defining virtue of science from within the discourse of science, but also inspired fictional narratives that challenged it—and thus called the new science into question. Thus I reveal the effects, in literary texts and the wider culture as well as in expedition narratives and scientific discourse, when experiments did not produce predictable results, or failed completely to comprehend their subjects. I suggest that because of its simultaneous availability and resistance to investigation, the Arctic became an external representative of the fear and desire buried within scientific objectivity. It has remained fascinating in the European cultural imaginary for this reason, as an Other, embodying fear but also longing for a world that eludes mastery by our technologies of knowledge-production. A consequence of this is that aspects of the Arctic have been used by Europeans to configure alternatives and oppositions to scientific culture as it was practised from the early nineteenth century onwards. Specifically, “The Ancient Mariner” and Frankenstein interrogate the claims of “objective” report and accurate experiment and, in doing so, remodel Erasmus Darwin’s fictionalisation and poeticisation of scientific discourse for a more vexed and hostile literary context than the one in which he wrote
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".