MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4414978028 · doi:10.1353/his.2025.a971515

Uncontrollable Noise: The Loss of HMS Nimble , 1834

2025· article· en· W4414978028 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Henning Trüper

Bibliographic record

VenueHistoire sociale · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicColonialism, slavery, and trade
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsThe ImaginaryDozenCrewSightNavy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: HMS Nimble , a Royal Navy schooner having recently captured a Spanish slaver and taken aboard 272 slaves, ran ashore at nighttime in bad weather on the Cuban coast in November 1834. While all crew were saved, several dozen of the African recaptives aboard lost their lives in the accident, which according to the Nimble ’s master had occurred because the “uncontrollable noise of these savages” had made it impossible to hear the breaking of the waves on the reef. What emerges from a detailed reconstruction of the perceptions of the accident as evident in the court martial documents is a specific imaginary of the comical, based on a profound lack of mastery over the moving parts of the situation—natural, technical, and social. This imaginary is intimately related to the moral language of humanitarianism but also adds to the patterns of victimization and the cruel ironies of abolition. Abstract: Le HMS Nimble , une goélette de la Marine royale qui venait de saisir un navire de traite espagnol et de prendre à son bord 272 esclaves, s’est échoué de nuit par mauvais temps sur la côte cubaine en novembre 1834. Si tous les membres de l’équipage ont pu être sauvés, plusieurs dizaines d’esclaves africains qui se trouvaient à bord ont perdu la vie dans cet accident qui, selon le capitaine du Nimble , s’est produit parce que le « bruit incontrôlable de ces sauvages » avait empêché d’entendre le déferlement des vagues sur les récifs. Ce qui se dégage d’une reconstruction détaillée des perceptions de l’accident telles qu’elles ressortent des documents de la cour martiale, c’est un imaginaire spécifique du comique, fondé sur un profond manque de maîtrise des éléments mobiles de la situation — naturels, techniques et sociaux. Cet imaginaire est intimement lié au langage moral de l’humanitarisme, mais il s’ajoute également aux modèles de victimisation et aux ironies cruelles de l’abolition.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.332
Threshold uncertainty score0.661

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0190.006
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.003
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 head0.010
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.261 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueHistoire socialeSame topicColonialism, slavery, and tradeFrench-language works237,207