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Record W4411100067 · doi:10.1007/s12685-025-00362-z

Martin Melosi: Water in North American environmental history

2025· article· en· W4411100067 on OpenAlex
Uwe Lübken

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueWater History · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Medicine
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersLudwig-Maximilians-Universität München
KeywordsEnvironmental historyEnvironmental ethicsHistoryEngineeringForensic engineeringEconomic historyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

the historical importance of water.Neither does this reviewer have to be convinced that water has been a major force in many developments and events of the past that historians better reckon with than ignore.And still, while browsing through the 281 pages, reading the 25 chapters and looking at the 36 illustrations in Martin Melosi's magnificent Water in North American History, the ubiquity, the significance, and the multi-faceted nature of water's ways are amazing.Water is stored behind gigantic dams, in swimming pools and drinking bottles.It flows through cities, bodies, landscapes and huge infrastructural devices.It can be contaminated, polluted, enriched and purified (again).Water is the source of life, power, fun, and sometimes death.It is endowed with material as well as aesthetic qualities.The water cycle connects (almost) every place of this earth and yet the distribution of water is highly uneven.It spills and leaks into places where it is not supposed to be and is being diverted to destinations it would never have reached on its own.It is difficult to ascertain what the bigger problem is: too much water or not enough of it.Martin Melosi's book is part of the series "Themes in Environmental History" that mostly aims at undergraduate history and environmental studies students.It tackles the versatility of water in eight sections, each of which contains two to four "water episodes" (2) of approximately 10 pages each, understood by the author as "departure points for discussion and the basis for starting conversations" rather than "comprehensive learning vehicles."(2) This is true insofar as the individual episodes resemble scholarly articles more than textbook chapters (the one exception being the lack of references).However, it is also a bit of an understatement since Melosi's vignettes often highlight key events, developments, technologies and practices in the water history of North America (not so much individuals though).It is particularly the arrangement of and the interaction between the "water episodes" which lends the book an encyclopedic quality.The three articles in the first part of the book that speaks about Indigenous peoples before contact are a case in point.Here, Melosi deals with the Hohokam in the American Southwest, the Aztecs in Central Mexico and the Inuit in Canada's arctic region, and their respective encounters with water.This approach allows him not only to cover, exemplarily, the entire geographic region of North

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.393
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.173
Teacher spread0.158 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it