Monocultural Authority and Imperialist Extraction in the Primary-Secondary Source Division
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines one way that colonial logic is embedded in western academic practices. It argues that the conventional dichotomy between primary and secondary sources in the humanities and social sciences reflects western monocultural hegemony in its application to non-western knowledges. In these fields, primary sources are treated as objects, analysed as evidence, and used as data, while secondary sources get to act as subjects and are engaged with as experts. This paper identifies a problematic dynamic where Indigenous authorities whose expertise does not align with western academic norms are categorised and used as primary sources, thereby stripping them of their agency and subjectivity. Their knowledge is extracted, commodified, and appropriated for the benefit of the west. Further, the paper critiques the role of librarians and archivists in perpetuating this colonial logic through their instruction practices and professional frameworks and standards, especially around primary source literacy and evaluating authority. These practices promulgate monocultural tools through which knowledge is extracted and evaluated. This paper calls on librarians to critically assess their role in maintaining colonial structures that continue to marginalise Indigenous Knowledge.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".