Life history of a collection: the Tahltan materials collected by James A. Teit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper documents the life history of the Tahltan materials from northwestern British Columbia collected by James A. Teit in 1912 and 1915 for the Geological Survey of Canada. The paper situates the collector's work in the social and institutional contexts that influenced his activities, gives recognition to the Tahltan people who contributed to the collection’s construction, and provides an overview of how the collection is currently organized in the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC). I address the questions: what is the life history of this collection? and what constitutes this collection today? Naming and classifying activities, macro-systems of museum classification, contribute to, and indeed create, the dispersed nature of large museum collections. Removed from communities and social settings, assembled 'artefacts' are dispersed to central holding agencies far afield from ethnographic sites and the originating peoples. Thus, the paper focusses on the relationship between field collecting and museum collections as archival records exemplified by the collection assembled by Teit in northwestern British Columbia. Further, the paper addresses the issues arising from the report of the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples (1992). The conclusions of the Task Force call for improved access to collections by aboriginal peoples and point to the pressing need to carry out inventories of existing collections. Originally created to accommodate and even facilitate academic research, museum classification practices actually impede the implementation of the Task Force's recommendations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".