"André Michaux in North America: Journals & Letters, 1785–1797" edited by Charlie Williams, Eliane M. Norman, and Walter Kingsley Taylor, translated by Eliane M. Norman, foreword by James E. McClellan, 2020 [book review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
124 colour figures, 18 black and white figures, and 16 maps, 68.95 CAD, Hardcover.This weighty tome (literally, it weighs almost 2.3 kg!) provides a day-to-day account of the North American travels and discoveries of iconic 18th century French naturalist André Michaux (1746-1802).Those discoveries were essential in his preparation of Flora Boreali-Americana (Pa risiis et Argentorati [i.e., Paris et Strasbourg, France], Apud fratres Levrault, 1803).When posthumously published in 1803, it represented the first flora for eastern North America.André Michaux in North America does more than just translate his original journals from French.The editors of this attractive and physically well-produced book copiously annotate and expand upon Michaux's raw entries.They fill in many of the frequent gaps in the record with information gleaned from his miscellaneous papers and from correspondence by him and/ or his associates.And what a time he had!Venturing out from Charleston, South Carolina, where he maintained a large garden property, Michaux scoured the wild areas of what is now the eastern United States on foot and by horseback in search of plants of economic, medicinal, or scientific significance.The prize finds were sent back to his royal (and later republican) sponsors in France.Such an undertaking would have been incredibly challenging-even life-threatening-for anyone in the late 18th century.This was a period of Other
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.019 |
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".