A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia by Katya Hokanson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. x + 344 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐4560‐4
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Woman's Empire might bring to mind Catherine II, "the Great," who oversaw considerable Russian imperial expansion.The actual focus of Katya Hokanson's book emerges in her subtitle: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia.It treats the writing of women who traveled in Asia, especially Central Asia, in the later nineteenth century in the context of their travels or expeditions.This overlaps with analogous writings from other parts of the empire, such as Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia's ethnographic study Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (translation published 1993); indeed, her father got the extra surname to honor his explorations in the Tian-Shan mountains, near the Pamirs, which feature in this book.The topic also resonates with the final expedition of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's entomologist father in Nabokov's novel The Gift, as Hokanson briefly notes (p.20): this moment in late imperial scientific ambition has been important in Russian history and culture.The peasants back home recur in implicit or explicit comparison to the residents of Central Asia encountered by these authors.The topic lets the reader look at practices and assumptions of imperial expansion and Russia's "civilizing" mission (both of these in competition with Britain) while considering women's roles in science and the imperial bureaucracy.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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