Book Review: <i>Maritime Animals: Ships, Species, Stories</i> by Kaori Nagai, ed. NagaiKaori, ed., Maritime Animals: Ships, Species, Stories. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023. 240 pp., illustrations, index. ISBN 978-0-2710-9537-0, US$125 (hbk).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like the first, it stems from papers presented at the Maritime Animals conference held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in April 2019.The lively attendance at this conference is a testament to the environmental turn in maritime history scholarship, as well as an increased interest in animal history.Maritime Animals is a coherent collection of essays exploring not only non-human involvement in rapidly expanding human networks, but also the devastating actions that have caused the destruction of the oceans' habitats.Each of the book's essays is written from the perspective of one particular animal species.Some of the animals, such as sheep, sledge dogs and horses, have travelled on ships operated by humans and been transported by them.Sheep, in Nancy Cushing's chapter, for example, were transported to Australia as cargo.The Merino sheep had an important role to play in the Australian colonization project as they produced wool, which became one of country's staple export products.Horses, in Donna Landry's essay, were also transported as (valuable) cargo as part of the horse trade, but also as pieces of war technology.They are among the species that suffer greatly on ships (with many dying) due to seasickness, disease, injury and the lack of air and movement.However, other animals have travelled on board ships independently, and even willingly, such as the rats in Kaori Nagai's chapter and the worms in the Age of Sail in Derek Lee Nelson and Adam Sundberg's contribution.In this book, the ship is mostly understood as a tool for European colonization, through which human activities have affected, mostly negatively, non-human animals.One of the book's most interesting viewpoints is to highlight the transportation of many animal species as weapons for humans' imperialist purposes.These animals had various tasks in humans' missions: in Lea Edgar's essay, for example, sledge dogs were taken on board the St. Roch as part of the Arctic colonization and civilizing mission of the Canadian state in pushing into Inuit settlements between 1928 and 1954.
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 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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".