Following the Fish, Mapping the Way: Cod Routes, Fisher-Pilots and Early Maps of the Grand Banks, 16th–19th Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper posits that relations between cod ecology, traditional piloting practices, and transatlantic fishing methods underline the construction of cartographic knowledge of the Atlantic coast of North America and the Grand Banks in the 16th to 18th centuries. Based on an inventory of more than 200 maps showing the Grand Banks from 1500 to 1825, we show France’s preeminent role in mapping the Banks. We identify the early 16th-century role of fisher-pilots in mapping the coastline and the accore, or outer edge of the Banks, two corridors of abundant marine life. A new cartographic idea, showing the Banks as a chain of plateaux, appears in 1543 and increased from 1584 to 1630. Beginning in 1674, the French Admiralty acquired and reproduced charts made by Basque and Breton cartographers who had direct contact with fisher-pilots. The Admiralty began producing its own charts after 1713, using a system of consulting fishing captains.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".