Archival Description, Land, Settler Colonialism, and World-Building in the Collection des archives du Collège Sainte-Marie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the Society of Jesus returned to Turtle Island in the 1840s after the suppression of their order in 1773, searching for and consolidating the records they had been forced to leave behind was of utmost importance. The first Jesuit archivists set out to copy legal documents from Jesuits in Europe, records of their travels, and of correspondence between Jesuits in France, to build a coherent narrative of their order that foregrounded a sense of continuity with their forebears. The consolidation of these records led to the creation of the Collection des archives du Collège Sainte-Marie (CACSM). This article puts forward a case study that explores the description of records in the CACSM catalogue and the persistence and normalization of the catalogue descriptions into its later forms such as the index and internal database. It builds on recent scholarly examination of cataloguing systems and archival descriptions that have defined these as systems of knowledge, infrastructures of power, and tools of colonialism. We begin by arguing that the descriptive indicators of both original records and copies emphasized land as a means to assert Jesuit presence and influence, revealing the profound connection between the archive and settler colonialism. Then, we show that these descriptions were crucial actors that mobilized knowledge production by naming, framing or erasing information to meet the settler-colonial worldview. Finally, we demonstrate that the persistence of these catalogue descriptions, through the creation of other indexes and finding aids in the 1950s and beyond, signify their structural impact and functions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".