The Canada/US Border: An International Boundary as Continental Cross-Section
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Editor’s Note opens the present issue of RIAS through a meditation on the Canada-US border not simply as a line of division but as a dynamic cross-section—one that can reveal the entangled geographies, cultures, and histories of North America. Drawing insight from across the disciplines of geography, literature, history, and environmental studies, it proposes the east-west border as a methodological lens through which to apprehend regional continuities and local specificities alike. Exploring a number of examples, the essay considers the border as simultaneously separating and connecting the two countries, paying special attention to vernacular landscapes that defy simplistic geopolitical readings. The essay further considers the symbolic and contested role of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Vermont, recently politicized by US authorities, as a lived space of permeability and intercommunity resilience. Ultimately, the border emerges here as a site where the global and the local, the political and the personal, intersect— offering a uniquely instructive vantage point on the interdependent realities of modern North America.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".