Eighteenth-Century Samara in the Diary by English Officer of the Orenburg Expedition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the Diary of the Englishman John Castle, an important source on the history of the Orenburg Expedition (Commission) and regions where it operated. The expedition made a notable contribution to the annexation of new territories in southeast Russia and their development. The Diary is one of the few graphical testimonies on the history of the territory, as Castle was a draughtsman. The Diary was published in German in 1784 while a translation into Russian was only released in 1998. The article’s author also refers to another translation of parts of the Diary devoted to Samara translated by A. Ognev in the same year. The research demonstrates that Castle’s work contains noteworthy data on matters other than Kazakhstan, which until now has been of primary importance for specialists working with the source. It contains authentic and unique data on the daily life of Russian towns bordering Asian countries in the eighteenth century. The Diary also relates its author’s communications with the outstanding statesmen I. Kirilov and V. Tatishchev, Castle’s superiors. They headed the Orenburg Expedition (Commission) when its headquarters was located in Samara. Foreign specialists worked in the expedition because Russian modernisation relied on progressive foreign experience and a policy of attracting foreigners into Russian service. The view of a non-Russian expert on local realities is important given the presence of many actors on the outskirts of the empire. Social groups, including foreigners who served in Russia, participated in the process of forming “collective representations” of a society undergoing modernisation. This process had its own peculiarities in territories where modernisation and colonisation via the “frontier model”: Bashkiria, the Southern Urals, the Trans-Urals, and the Trans-Volga regions. Beyond any doubt, the search for and analysis of the written and artistic heritage of foreign witnesses of the development of southeastern Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century will add to our knowledge about an important epoch of Russian history and the life of its southeastern territories.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".