Davies, Adriana A. From Sojourners to Citizens. Alberta’s Italian History.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adriana Davies's volume fully highlights the outstanding importance of Italians in the migration history of Western Canada, particularly in the Province of Alberta, a topic scarcely addressed by scholars.The book represents one of the first comprehensive studies about the Italian presence in Alberta from the arrival of the Sardinian Oblate missionary Father Nicolas Coccola at St. Mary's mission near Kamloops in 1880 up to the second postwar waves of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.Davies, an Italian emigrant herself (from Grimaldi, Cosenza), downplays the role of Canada's two major metropolitan centres, Toronto and Montreal, as migrant and immigrant destinations for Italians up to the First World War.In this sense, the book aims to help "thaw the wasteland"-in the words of historian Gabriele Scardellato-of the Western Canada history of Italian experience.The pivotal contribution of this volume to the knowledge of the Italians in Alberta is beyond doubt.The author has handled a very diverse and complete array of literature and archives sources (e.g., a wide variety of examples of personal, family, and village migration experiences), being a result of her decades-long commitment in the museum sector of the province and Alberta's Italian community.The use of these extraordinary sources resulted from the rich and ample firsthand material kept in Alberta's archives, state and family (private) records, oral history collections, and community histories.Thus, an index of names of persons and an index of place names would have been very useful.The book is divided into ten chapters, prefaced by the introduction and completed by a select bibliography.The first four chapters (2, "Working on the Railways"; 3, "When Coal Was King"; 4 "Settling the Land"; and 5 "Shopkeepers, Tradesman and Entrepreneurs) mirror the prevalent areas of employment filled by Italians, particularly up to the First World War.The author clearly describes the average working trajectory of Italians in Alberta: "The building of the CPR [Canadian Pacific Railway] and branch railways brought Italian migrant workers to BC and Alberta.Once the bulk of the railways had been constructed, the coal mines provided ample employment" (20).The "lure of the land" and the promised returns of agricultural settlement did not attract many Italians, even though small agricultural colonies were set up in Naples (1906) and Venice-Hylo (1914-15).While railway and mine work represented a kind of entry point into the labour market, Italians
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
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".