Collecting Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Edinburgh University’s Natural History Museum
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.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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 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".