Collecting Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Edinburgh University’s Natural History Museum
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Enlightenment has long been defined as an age of expanding knowledge. Practices of collection, classification and display of objects, which intensified and spread along with the global extension of European empires and commercial networks, meant that Enlightenment intellectual aspiration became global in scope. This article focuses on the colonial collections of the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, the Rev. Dr John Walker, who was also the keeper of the university’s natural history museum. This article studies in particular the actors involved in the movement of a large collection of objects from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The collection was provided by an employee of the Company, Andrew Graham who also penned a manuscript about the artefacts and the people inhabiting Rupert’s Land. Graham’s collecting network included other traders, First Nation and Inuit actors and European-based naturalists. The article highlights the importance of conferring historical agency on a diverse cast of figures in the mobile formation and communication of colonial knowledge about humanity. It argues, however, that this movement of knowledge was not frictionless but was conditioned by uneven power relations and violence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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