Shoshana Keller. <i>Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This survey text produces a concise yet nuanced portrayal of Central Asia from the Mongol conquest to the early post-Soviet years. Keller defines Central Asia as the territories covering lands conquered by the tsarist empire in the nineteenth century, which were later incorporated into the Soviet Union. The work engages the relationship of these regions to Russia while ignoring links to other, closer areas, such as Chinese Turkestan and Afghanistan. The text nonetheless effectively tacks between politics, society, and daily life to produce a readable summary of regional history with a focus on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each section has its own dynamic. The chapters on “coexistence” (before the tsarist conquest) focus on relationships across Slavic and Turkic frontiers, as well as the numerous other peoples involved in exchanges and building polities as the Mongol conquerors lost their grip on Russia and Central Asia alike. Keller seeks to demonstrate that relationships between Russians and Central Asians differed from those, say, between peoples in Great Britain and South Asia. For centuries before conquest, Slavic, Turkic, and other frontier peoples knew each other well, traded, and warred. The focus here is on political history, as khanates, pastoralist confederations, and other units appear and disappear at a dizzying rate. Economics and trade often underpinned the rise and fall of leaders and their supporters. As Muscovy consolidated control and became imperial Russia, economic competition fractured Central Asia. This, along with developments in military technology, favored tsarist rulers, who worked to free Slavic slaves in Central Asia, gain favorable trade terms, and secure their ever-expanding southern frontier.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.009 |
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".