The Quest for a Clearing: Preface to the French Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Quest for a Clearing: Preface to the French Edition in america, and in quebec, the challenge of pushing back the forest was faced not only by the seventeenth-century explorers, but also by colonists and settlers up to the nineteenth century, when the abitibi region was opened up to settlement.The forest was the site of the first fundamental confrontation, the first resistance, the first struggle.The newcomers discovered it, ventured into it, looked for landmarks, got lost in it, searched for themselves in it as in a rite of initiation, and found themselves again in a clearing that soon opened out onto a horizon.Thirty years ago, when i asked myself where i was coming from intellectually and began searching for beaten paths, roads, avenues, i had the feeling of being in the position of an explorer facing more or less virgin forest.Throughout the process of intellectual discovery and research, one image stood out for me and sustained me: that of the clearing.My project was to find my way out of the woods i had entered -to come upon a little clearing, make my way to a larger clearing, and begin to see things clearly.i went from clearing to clearing, and now i am standing here gazing at a horizon, remembering the dense forest and its paths.This book is the story of the path taken, with landmarks and beacons placed so that readers and other explorers can also find their way to the horizon.This is a social history in that it aims to describe the complete circuit of ideas, their production, dissemination, and reception.it looks at the social background of the individuals who formulated the ideas (the french-speaking middle class in the liberal professions, the clergy, the english-speaking merchant bourgeoisie, the colonial and metropolitan authorities, the citizens), the networks and media that disseminated the currents of opinion, and the social penetration of the ideas.chapters 2, 5, 13, and 15, in particular, analyze the network of cultural institutions and instruments that disseminated the ideas, debates, and arguments.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.015 |
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".