Land, Science and Architecture: Politics of Scale in 1856–1939 Ottawa, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Settler colonial regimes of city making in Ottawa have incorporated the built environment to construct a narrative of liberalism, benevolence, and rational governance, effectively obscuring the processes of land dispossession and environmental transformation. This dissertation investigates the land representations that shape Ottawa as a settler state capital, examining the scientific institutions of the Dominion Observatory, the Central Experimental Farm, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the Central Canada Exhibition at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores how these state institutions relied on the manipulation of scales and the construction of architectural fictions to alter land into metrics of possession. This dissertation historicizes and critically examines architecture’s entanglement with imperial networks and settler colonial imaginaries through practices of bordering, inventorying, improving, and displaying in Ottawa and across Canada. It argues that architectural expertise, coupled with centralized government control, constructed geographies that structured the lives of both human and non-human entities within imperial frameworks. Beyond the visual culture of science in Ottawa, this study explores the frictions and contradictions inherent in the negotiation of terrains through architecture. By considering scale both as a subject of study and as a methodological tool, it delves into architectural histories of land, highlighting agential materialities within these practices.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".