Defining wilderness: the evolution of Banff National Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Internationally, Canada is a country known for its iconic, expansive landscapes. Images of the Rocky Mountains and destinations such as Lake Louise and Banff are instantly recognisable, drawing visitors from around the world each year. Wilderness is a term that has become irrevocably linked to Canadian national identity and Canadian culture. Nowhere is the significance of wilderness within Canadian culture and history more visible than in the country’s vast network of provincial and national parks. This article explores the history of Canada’s oldest national park, Banff, and the creation and evolution of its boundaries. It explores how park boundaries act as spatial tools to project legal frameworks and cultural values, creating landscapes and an experience of place rather than simply preserving existing conditions or ecologies. The history of Banff National Park is also used to explore the broader implications that idealised or romanticised notions of wild spaces have had in shaping Canadian cultural values, which in turn have shaped attitudes towards landscapes and the defining of landscapes into industrialised zones and zones of conservation. Fundamentally an architectural study of site, this article explores the evolution of the national park boundaries of Banff through their interactions with industrial interests, cultural landmarks and historical narratives, dissecting their capacities to control intensely layered and contested areas. Through a study of the park boundary and the forces that have shaped it over time, the dynamics of power, exclusion, exploitation and commercialisation inherent to the definition of landscapes and boundaries are investigated.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".