Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer by John Van Wyhe Lai Suat Yan Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer by JOHN VAN WYHE. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press: 2019. 344 pp. ISBN: 978-981-3250-76-5 This well-researched book on the amazing feat of the Austrian Ida Pfeiffer, documents her five adventurous journeys around the world starting with her first voyage to the Holy Land that traverses historical sites such as Smyrna, Beirut, Caesarea, and Jerusalem, the holy city central to various events in biblical history. The journey that started in late March 1842 took around six months. Her second journey to Iceland was to satisfy her romantic sensibility of visiting a remote place with immense natural wonders boasting a geography that included tundra, lakes, glaciers, geysers to volcanoes. During the six-month journey from April to October 1845, she visited Copenhagen, Hafnarfjörðour (Harbour Fjord), Reykjavík, Krýsuvík, a geothermal area, Gullfoss (Golden Falls), Mount Hekla, a volcano, Stockholm and Christiania (now Oslo). In 1846–1848, she circled the globe in 900 days as an expression of her wanderlust in her third voyage from Vienna to Prague, Brazil, Chile, Tahiti, Macao, Hong Kong, Canton, Singapore, Colombo and Kandy in Sri Lanka, Calcutta, Benares, Agra, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bombay in India, Assyria, Baghdad, Mosul, Urmia (Iran today), Nakhchivan and Yerevan in Armenia, Tbilisi and Redut Kale (present-day Kulevi) in Georgia, Odessa in Russia, Constantinople, Athens and Trieste before arriving home again in Vienna. Her fourth voyage from 1851–1855, included these localities: Prague, Hamburg, London, Cape Town, Singapore, Kuching and Sirambau in Sarawak before venturing into the heart of Borneo—Sintang, Landak, Pontianak, and Sambas. In this leg of the journey she also explored Java, Sumatra, the Maluku Islands, Sulawesi, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, California, New Orleans, Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Montreal, and Portugal. Her last journey was to Madagascar (1856–1858), presumably, because of the potential wealth of natural history specimens that may be handy to fund her next voyage. She caught the 'Madagascar fever' [End Page 220] during this trip, however, and died aged 61 at her brother's residence in Vienna on 27 October 1858. Her travels were also contextualized with the feats of the famous male travellers in history, namely Marco Polo, Captain Cook and Ibn Battuta, all of whom she surpassed in terms of the distance covered. Compared with female travellers preceding or during her time, for example, Maria Merian, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Mary Montagu and the Prussian Countess Ida Hahn-hahn, she stood out for venturing by herself on a limited budget. She typically travelled second or third class on steamers. Sailing on a crowded brig from Beirut to Alexandria for eleven nights she had no privacy. Others slept or used her mat whenever she left it momentarily and even used her toothbrush without asking. Travelling from Cairo on camel for the first time across the desert and unable to afford the rest houses, she slept outside their grounds. She survived numerous adventures on her trip including turbulent seas, robbery, threats that she would be killed and devoured and near drowning in a remarkably calm manner. Her experiences of living through poverty for nearly ten years after her husband lost his wealth, and her own wanderlust, stood her in good stead during these formidable encounters. She also learnt the skills needed to collect and preserve natural history specimens which she would sell to museums in order to fund her trips. Her adventurous spirit knew no bounds. She ventured to Telemark, Norway, though it was difficult for a woman to travel alone among the peasantry particularly with almost rudimentary command of the language. Places to which no Europeans had ventured or where the local men were killed, for example in Sumatra, seemed instead to spur her on rather than deter her spirits. Her wanderlust was ignited by the man she loved who had spurned her. It became an escape route that enabled her to follow her heart, particularly after the constraining life growing up under the dictates of her mother. These observations allowed us glimpses of the circumstances that drove her to embark on these remarkable journeys. Nevertheless...
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.084 | 0.060 |
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".