Is the <i>SlaveVoyages</i> database useful for scholars of slave trading in the wider Indian Ocean World?
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
Assessing the differences between scholarly collaboration on slave trading in the Atlantic World, on the one hand, and similar activities in the wider Indian Ocean, on the other, needs to begin with an assessment of the relative importance of slave trading in the two oceans. Both oceans saw a maritime slave trade that drew heavily on sub–Saharan Africa. But while almost all captives arriving in the Americas came from Africa, in the Indian Ocean World there was a significant, probably majority, traffic in non-Africans, especially if one includes the South China Sea, as indeed most assessments of the Indian Ocean World slave trade do. Focusing on Africa alone initially, scholars who have made their name in the Atlantic World have tended to support the idea that the combined numbers of the Sahara Desert and Indian Ocean slave trade over two millennia were about the same as the volume of the transatlantic slave trade in its 360 years of existence.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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