Bagging Peaks and Busting Trails: Place-Making in the Canadian Rockies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on ethnographic research conducted during the summer of 2009, I explore affective narratives of landscape and memory created through the activity of backpacking.Using the town of Banff as my 'base-camp', I hiked the surrounding trails, interviewing other Canadians engaged in both the literal and figurative exploration of wilderness through backcountry camping.Arguably, the activity itself is founded upon a problematic modernist (and colonial) separation between nature and culture, and backpackers continue to reify this separation through their idealization of wilderness.However, because hikers engage in a much more tangible and direct way with the landscape than most tourists, they are often simultaneously confronted with places, moments, and actions that do not fit clearly into the paradigm of a pristine wild space.By traversing the landscape, hikers have a sensory encounter with place that possesses far more depth than the panoramas of a typical tourist photograph.Blood, sweat and tears are often shed on these trips, and encounters with snow, hail, rockslides, and wildlife transform the experience.Hiking thus acts as a more complex form of 'place-making' than usually discussed in critiques of tourism, and yields insights into the ways in which Canadians imagine and engage with their 'wild backyard'.Banff's mystique relies on its characterization as a space empty of society, as a pristine wilderness, and yet it is also layered with social signification as a place: home, recreation ground, ancestral territory.Geographers, historians, and anthropologists from William Cronon(1995) to Bruce Braun(2002) have written prolifically on the `trouble with wilderness` to paraphrase the title of Cronon`s famous article and the problematic colonial concept of terra nullius that idealizations of wilderness seem to imitate.For the pursuit of wilderness to be successful, nature must be demarcated
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".