Searching for botanical knowledge: The plant hunters of the Nova Scotian Institute of (Natural) Science, 1862-1902
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accepting Suzanne Zeller’s notion that maddening historical and scientific enticements are lurking in the 150 years [now 162 years] of the Proceedings and Transactions of the Nova Scotian Institute of Science, this paper examines the botanical contributions of eight prominent Institute plant hunters who published papers on their findings between 1863 (volume one) and 1902 (volume ten). Some members of this varied group of clergy, naturalists, botanists, lawyers and physicians, whose interest in nature often transcended their professional and private lives, studied plants and assembled herbaria as leisurely indulgences; others viewed the natural world through a theological lens, but many considered the accumulation of botanical knowledge an essential science. Rather than a single narrative thread, this paper intertwines a series of brief biographies of each plant hunter, followed by summaries of published reports about important botanical questions that occupied the Institute during its formative years and contextually relevant commentaries to tell the wider story of the evolving and often controversial relationship between the Institute and the role of natural history to both science and society during its first four decades.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".