A Needle in a Haystack: Looking for an Early Modern Peasant Who Travelled from Spain to America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seventeenth-century travel accounts written by ordinary people are a rarity. In this article, we analyze the unusual travel report by Gregorio de Robles, a Castilian peasant (labrador) who travelled several European empires in Western Europe and America at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The approach we offer is that of a global microhistory. The aim of this article is mainly methodological: we try to delineate the methodological steps we had to undertake to trace Robles in the sources. Looking for an early modern peasant traveler is comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack, but we argue that this endeavor is worthwhile because Robles offers a unique perspective on how ordinary people traveled in early modern times and on imperial frontier zones. We show that his convivial ties and the places he mentions were key elements in the methodology.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".