The search for a promised land: three settlement plans, three agents, and three handbooks for Icelandic migrant-settlers from 1875
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nineteenth century was a time of mass migration from Europe to North America, and in the last quarter of the century, Icelanders joined the flow of European settlers. Icelanders were one of the last European peoples in this period to start sailing west, between 1870 and 1914; but, one in every five Icelanders moved to North America. This article looks at three handbooks for prospective Icelandic migrant-settlers – all published in 1875 – and the settlement plans they promoted (in Nova Scotia, today’s Manitoba, and Alaska), to analyse the information presented to prospective settlers, especially depictions of land and its inhabitants. While the texts, written or translated by three Icelandic immigration agents, vary greatly in their scope and tone, all perceive Icelanders as desirable settlers, suitable for advancing the goals of settler colonialism, and portray the areas as terra nullius, minimizing perceived Indigenous presence in the places marked for European settlement. The texts show that prospective Icelandic emigrants reading these booklets were aware that they contributed to and benefited from Indigenous dispossession, and that Icelanders and other ‘ethnic’ migrant-settlers in British settler colonies should be considered in settler colonial studies, as settler colonialism and migration policy are intimately linked.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it