What were we mapping? From the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project to the Southern Kalahari
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
Maps express the authority of those who make them, their claims to know and therefore own the world or the areas of the world that they thus declare to be theirs.Colonial and imperial expansion can be traced through a history of cartography.The names on British maps of Canada and much of southern Africa are evocative of their origins and purpose: members of the royal family, commanders of expeditions, explorers who represent the nation become headlands, islands, mountains and rivers.The challenge to these imperial claims, the assertion of prior or original entitlement to those lands, can also come in the form of maps.These set out different kinds of information about place, with names that belong much more deeply in the past and in the land.The authority behind these maps, and the needs that they meet, come from the peoples who have used and occupied the land 'since time immemorial'.The colonists' frontiers are thus revealed to be indigenous peoples' homelands.The modern history of challenges to Canadian sovereignty, especially in the Arctic and British Columbia, is to be seen in a series of mapping projects.It was in these maps of indigenous life that representation of an altogether different way of knowing, using and laying claim to their lands, was pioneered.These rival maps, and the whole idea of cultural mapping, depended on a process and methodology that focused on achieving decolonization, originated in Canada and then spread across the social scientific and indigenous political world.I was fortunate to work on several of the Canadian projects, and also had the opportunity to help carry the methodology to the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa.What follows here is a summary of this flow of mapping, a story about a set of stories each of which centers on a potential transformation of how the world should be seen and understood. *** 1I insert hyphens to show the place of nnguar; these would not be used in usual roman orthography for Inuktitut.2In a recent filmed interview (January, 2020) George Qulaut, an Inuit elder from Igloolik, said that "land" without inclusion of all "the animals" did not make sense to Inuit.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it