The limits of imperial influence: John James Audubon in British North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For two decades, John James Audubon (1785–1851) travelled widely and frequently while working on his illustrated natural history volumes – still highly prized today for their aesthetic and scientific merit: Birds of America (1827–1838) and Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846–1854). Neither independently wealthy nor employed as a salaried scientist, the artist-naturalist with a flair for marketing financed his projects by selling subscriptions. Successfully marketing Birds to members of the British aristocracy, as well as to organizations and to artistic and intellectual elites, Audubon was reluctant to take Quadrupeds to Britain even though sales there were key to the financial viability of his work. Instead, in 1842 Audubon travelled to Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), the most populous region of British North America. The colony was, he calculated, a viable source of subscribers; however, he was wrong. Moreover, having travelled to British North America previously, he should have expected modest returns. Nonetheless, he was optimistic that this expedition would succeed where those to New Brunswick (1832) and Labrador and Newfoundland (1833) had failed. This paper examines why success eluded Audubon in the colonies, arguing that entrepreneurialism buttressed by patronage – a winning strategy in Britain – failed because there was a vast difference between metropolis and hinterland when it came to supporting the arts and sciences.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".