A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to recent debates about the geography of power, the nation-state, cartographic history, and postcolonial theory. It does so by connecting the themes of these literatures and exploring empirically the claims about the narration of nation made by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha. The two empirical case studies come from contemporary Canada, and concern, in part, the mapping of the nation-state. The first case is a British Columbia trial in which two First Nations, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, brought a case against the provincial and federal governments over the recognition of their native sovereignty. The second study is of volume 1 of the Historical Atlas of Canada, which, unlike many others before it, sought to place native peoples and spaces within the overarching cartography of the country. In both studies, the ambivalent (post) colonial power relations of cartography—the fact that they can work both for and against colonialism—become evident. They therefore serve as exemplary lessons concerning the political geography of mapping and the chronic persistence into the present of colonial assumptions about cartography. But more than this, the studies also raise significant questions about the limits of Bhabha’s locution of “location” as a site for a performative form of political agency. The paper suggests, therefore, that, while spatial theorists can usefully draw on Bhabha’s postcolonial supplements to theories of the nation, the work of producing postcolonial geographies of national negotiations simultaneously supplements and displaces Bhabha’s own abstraction of agency.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".