Examining the Colonial Legacies of the Hunterian’s Mineralogical and Petrological Collection: New Perspectives on Geoscience Collections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The origin of the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery’s mineralogical and petrological collection can be traced back to Sir William Hunter’s bequest of his collections to the University of Glasgow upon his death in 1783. Examination of the collection’s colonial legacies is only in its nascent stages, reflecting that the scrutiny of colonial legacies is still in its infancy in geoscience museums. Here I review the history of the collection, its composition and usage, and I put those factors into the broader perspective of museums’ colonial legacies. Among the issues I consider are the extent to which the collection contains international specimens and the extent to which these objects are accessed by their source nations. Also explored are the biases which exist in the limited provenance ascribed to objects in the collection and how certain individuals or types of information may be excluded from documentation. The purpose of these investigations is to consider whether the collection continues to contribute to colonial legacies of the museum sector. After an examination of these aspects of the collection, new ways of working for geoscience collections are proposed, including standards for gathering data; expanding the collection’s reach to more users; and repatriating objects. These initial measures can change the power imbalances apparent in the Hunterian collection and the geosciences more broadly.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".