Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the influence of conventions set by The Photographic Atlas of Auroral Forms, published by the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (1930), on protocols employed at Arctic stations researching the aurora borealis during the Second International Polar Year (1932–1933). The atlas was created by a committee led by Professor Carl Størmer, the leading auroral scientist of the early twentieth century. It categorized auroral forms, established codes for viewing the phenomenon through the camera lens, and provided a multitude of carefully selected photographs to direct the reader. Responding to a call for greater emphasis on verticality in studies of twentieth-century atmospheric science, this paper addresses the vertical dimension as both a consideration in the process of visually documenting the fleeting and intangible forms of the aurora as well as a subject of study in its own right, in relation to altitude measurements of the phenomenon. With a focus on the specific instrumentation used, light is shed on the difficulties of calibration across polar stations, bodily comportments involved in viewing aurorae, and properties of the northern lights revealed through temporal distance from the display. In seeking to answer the methodological question of whether atlases reflect the reality of scientific practices, I analyze how The Atlas of Auroral Forms affected observational routines among Norwegian, British, Canadian, American, and Dutch polar year groups. Emphasis is placed on instances of divergence from its guidance to demonstrate that research practices do not always follow inexorably from an instructive text, even given the most favorable of conditions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".