A British Sky: Imperial Networks and the Symbiotic Relationship Between Imperialism and Astronomy in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite modern perceptions of science as an apolitical, irreligious, democratizing force, science has historically been a tool used by individuals and organizations for their own purposes. In the case of late European empires, science and scientific “progress” were valuable tools for agendas of Christianization and civilization. Moreover, scientists and scientific methods could be used to further the types of work needed to grow empire – such as a map-making and exploration. However, the relationship between science and empire was not limited to imperial domination. Scientists and scientific bodies could also use the tools of empire to further their scientific work. The Royal Astronomical Society is an excellent example of the “use” of empire – most of its funding came from imperial pundits looking to entrench British superiority. Among the various scientific disciplines practiced in the nineteenth century, astronomy played an interesting role in entrenching the relationship between science and empire – particularly as it was practiced on the fringes of the British empire. Growing empires necessitated the creation and proliferation of new technologies that in turn made practicing science in recently acquired colonies much easier. The interconnected web of new technologies, scientists, and imperial structures of power and politics combined with scientific desires, colonial ideals, race relations, and imperial economies of trade and knowledge to produce an incredibly complicated vision of science. Astronomy, in its looking to the heavens, reflected back upon earthly issues to ultimately reveal the tangled ideologies that permeated British imperial science at this time. This story of British imperial astronomy is meant to complicate modern notions of what science is and has been.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".