Following the Fish, Mapping the Way: Cod Routes, Fisher-Pilots and Early Maps of the Grand Banks, 16th–19th Centuries
Why this work is in the frame
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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.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it