White Archives, Black Fragments: Problems and Possibilities in Telling the Lives of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Slavery is the most neglected aspect of pre-Confederation Canadian history. Yet traces and examples of slavery are imprinted in various documents throughout the Maritimes, Upper Canada, and Quebec. It is not surprising that slavery played a part in Canadian history, but it is startling that it has not received widespread attention from the general Canadian public and historians alike. Just five years ago, Ken Donovan noted that, although various artists, writers, directors, and historians have worked on slavery, it “is not a significant part of the Canadian historical narrative.” Studying slavery in Canada, as opposed to, say, escaped American slaves, “goes against the dominant image of Canada as a land of freedom.” The focus, understandably, when discussing African Canadian history has been on the Underground Railroad, the Black Loyalists, and other groups who found freedom under the British flag. Yet thousands of black people were enslaved in colonial Canada between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries (1605–1820). We must recognize the significance of slavery to the history of Canada even if there were no large-scale slave plantations or major staple products like cotton or tobacco. One way to recognize slavery is to examine biographical sketches of enslaved people in the Maritimes and other parts of Canada.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".