Messages to Ancestors: Following the Notes from Africville to Emancipation to the Door of No Return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On Canadian Thanksgiving in October 2023, I stood on the shores of Gorée Island, next to the Door of No Return, off the west coast of Dakar, Senegal. Facing westward across the Atlantic Ocean and with the help of Fallou Bal, our Senegalese guide, I bent down and set fire to a collection of Messages to Ancestors, handwritten on paper by various Canadians of African Descent from Africville, Nova Scotia, to Emancipation, Ontario, and many others in between. The smoke ascended into the African skies. Entrusted to carry their messages, I fulfilled my role as the messenger and documented the burning. My presence on African soil was the culmination of a decade of relationships that began with the Canadian communities of Africville and Emancipation at the start of my academic journey, which fortuitously also aligned with the Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024). As such, the opportunity to carry their messages back to Africa was a blessing and an auspicious gift. The paper chronicles this journey following the notes from Africville to Emancipation to the Door of No Return.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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.
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".