Black Activism, Print Culture, and Literature in Canada, 1850–1865
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter documents and explores Black activism, print culture, and literature in Canada West. In response to the Compromise of 1850, Canada West sees the North American Convention of Colored Freemen held in Toronto (September 10, 1851), the emigration of Mary Ann Shadd to Windsor – where she will publish A Plea for Emigration (1852) and her newspaper, The Provincial Freeman (1853–9) – and John Brown’s visit seeking to “legitimize his projects in the United States by obtaining an endorsement from the Black community in Chatham.” As Siemerling puts it, at mid-century Chatham had become “one of the secret capitals of Black North America.” In his larger argument for reading a rich tradition of Black writing in Canada West contrapuntally as both transnational and part of a national Canadian tradition, he also draws our attention to how important Canada West was as both an emigration site and one in which to imagine and plan the staging of revolution. Siemerling is careful to note that Canada West should be considered not only a transnational space but, importantly, also a national space in which these practices of Black geography counter ongoing attempts to “insistently exteriorize Blackness from Canada.”
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".