Ornithology, Anthropology, and the History of Medicine: Casey Wood's Asian and Pacific Travels and Collections, c1920-36
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Casey Wood's retirement allowed him time to expand his horizons, both in terms of his travel and the scope of his intellectual enquiries. His ornithological interests in Fiji in the South Pacific and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in South Asia led him to fund the production of two large-scale collections of paintings illustrating the birds of these two islands. Both original collections were reserved for the Blacker-Wood library, but in Ceylon, these paintings also formed the basis of The Coloured Plates of the Birds of Ceylon, published between 1927 and 1935. In Ceylon and Kashmir, Wood collected manuscripts and lithographs, mainly relating to the history of medicine. His collection of palm-leaf manuscripts (olas) from Ceylon was particularly extensive, with over 220 remaining in the Osler and Rare Books and Special Collections branches of the McGill libraries. Wood also collected physical objects, beginning with bird skins, nests, and eggs in Fiji and branching out to include objects associated with healing in Ceylon. The object from Ceylon, numbering around 200, were originally collected for the Medical Museum and are now housed in the Redpath Museum at McGill. They represent a unique resource for the material culture of medicine. Wood's travels brought him into contact with a wide range of people, from the American plant prospector David Fairchild to Rabindranath Tagore, a central figure in the Bengali renaissance. Wood's reflections on his journeys provide some interesting insights into practices of natural history and collecting in late colonial societies on the brink of the second world war.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.070 | 0.008 |
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".