Arctic Exploration and the Mobility of Phrenology: John Ross's Ethnographic Portraits of the Netsilingmiut
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analysing a set of ethnographic images and illustrations resulting from John Ross’s second voyage to find a Northwest Passage in 1829–1833, this article considers the ways in which Arctic exploration intersected with emergent scientific thinking about race and ethnicity in Britain. In particular, it examines how mobility impacted ideas of phrenology and scientific imaging in the context of the Arctic. As a practitioner of phrenology and member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, Ross’s expertise in this new mental science certainly travelled with him to the Arctic. As his field drawings and book illustrations testify, however, Ross’s knowledge was also affected by his immediate contact with the Inuit in Boothia Peninsula in Nunavut. Comparing Ross’s field drawings and illustrations in his two-volume Narrative and Appendix to their accompanying texts and to select ethnographic illustrations produced by his fellow Arctic explorers, this article uncovers the material and conceptual transformations Ross’s scientific visualisation of Inuit underwent during his physical movement between Britain and the Arctic.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it