Transforming the Wilderness into God’d Creation: John James Audubon in a Canadian Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article deals with the kind of knowledge historically imposed upon the wilderness of the New World, with the threat that nonverbal reality poses for the human mind, and with the taxonomic fever that took over Natural Science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will look at these issues through two texts which cover the expedition of John James Audubon to Labrador (Canada) in the summer of 1833: one of them is a biographical document, Audubon and His Journals (1897), the other is a fictional work, the novel Creation (2002) written by Katherine Govier. I will draw from Audubon’s Journals and from Govier’s novel in order to discuss why Labrador was envisaged by both artists as challenging the ingrained human duty to draw lines and to separate one form of life from another. The uncharted territory of Labrador baffles Audubon’s usual power to name and to draw, and takes the reader back to the myth of creation, to Genesis, where it is clearly established that nothing really exists without the confirmation of language.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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 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".