“Amongst the howlings of wild beasts”: British travel writers and wild animal encounters in early America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals, despite attracting relatively little scholarly attention in the field of travel literature studies, occupied a central place in British travelogues describing North America during the long eighteenth century. Travellers associated “wild beasts” with an idea of wilderness, looking to animals to understand New World environments and engage in natural philosophy. Yet they also found that wild animals were not so readily controlled; rather than passive objects, animals were their own historical agents. Wild beasts threatened travellers in the woods and broke down notions of anthropocentricism, frustrated attempts to classify them, and, most alarmingly, refused to retreat from civilisation’s advance, raising questions as to what extent colonialism could remake America. Taking a selection of contemporary British travelogues and drawing upon the literature of the animal turn, this paper argues that travel accounts provide a fruitful way to explore human-animal interactions, as well as the role played by animals in colonisation.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".