Ten Years of The Northern Mariner: A Decade of Dedicated Nautical Research and the Challenge Ahead
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ten Years of The Northern Mariner: A Decade of Dedicated Nautical Research and the Challenge Ahead H.T. HolmanWhen I read Dr. Mike Bender's critical article on trends in nautical research in a recent number of the Northern Mariner, it struck me that he was writing not just about journals he had selected for analysis but about the field in general.His paper once again raised the question of the current state and the prospects for the future of nautical history. 1 Seeing the numbers that Dr. Bender produced and the inferences that could be drawn from them inspired me to look more closely at how we in the Canadian Nautical Research Society (CNRS) would fare from similar scrutiny.Dr. Bender has provided an analysis of ten years of articles appearing in four journals: The Mariner's Mirror, Maritime South West, the International Journal of Maritime History, and the Journal for Maritime Research.2 He examines the articles from a number of perspectives and categorizes them according to authorship, content, identity, and periodization.Based on this, he provides several observations, few of which, unfortunately, should come as a surprise to those working, or interested in the field.Surprises, if any, come from the intensity of the quantification supporting the anecdotal observations which many of us have made.After looking at 744 papers, Dr. Bender noted that 88.1 percent dealt with either war and naval matters (43.3 percent) or mercantile subjects (44.8 percent).However, if one excludes the papers in his own journal, Maritime South West, the situation is even more extreme with 95.7 percent of the articles being either 1 This seems to be a favourite research topic for nautical scholars and the journals are littered with self examination which speaks to a lack of self-esteem for the profession. 2 Mike Bender, "If Maritime Historians Are in Danger of being left with their journals and not much else" (Lewis Fischer), What Can Those Journals Tell Us about Ourselves?A Ten-Year Study," The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord 32, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 1-20.The TNM article expands on a previous study by Bender: "Who Sails the Seaway of Diamonds?The Ten Year Study Revisited," Maritime South West 33 (2020): 199-213.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.045 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
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".