Bibliographic record
Abstract
Preparing historical documents for publication is no easy matter, even if the material involved has been printed in a contemporary newspaper, as was the case for these letters.The transcriptions were made from microfilm versions prepared forty years ago by the Canadian Library Association.These microfilms are not perfect sources.Occasionally the microfilm would miss part of the page, or reproduce either a fold or a hole in the original.Moreover, because of their age, the microfilms have faded and have in some places become virtually illegible.Since the newspapers involved are almost 150 years old and printed on less than high quality paper, it has proved impossible to consult original versions to check the transcriptions.Thus in a few cases there are illegibilities, noted with square brackets in the text.The material provided several other problems as well.One difficulty occurred in the Begg series, where the numbers employed by the newspaper to refer to the letters as originally printed did not always agree with the actual number of the letter in the sequence as reprinted.This was particularly noticeable toward the end of the series, where there appears to be a letter missing, both from the numbered sequence and in terms of the sense of the narrative.As for the Hargrave series, there was a problem with the pen names attached to the letters.A number of Red River correspondents, including JJ. Hargrave, signed themselves "Red River" and had their letters printed in the eastern newspapers.To make matters worse, the Montreal Herald occasionally lumped together several different letters signed "Red River," although not all of the text had come from Hargrave.This edition has tried to sort out the Hargrave letters from the other "Red River" correspondence that appears not to be by Hargrave.If accurate transcriptions, numbering the letters, and the nomenclature of authors of newspaper correspondence in 1869-70 proved a problem, so too in a different sense did the way of presenting annotations.Both Begg and Hargrave refer to people and events that seemed to require additional clarification or elaboration.That additional information has been treated in three ways.Where the information provides a brief definition or is
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.622 | 0.430 |
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".