[De]constructing the countryside: Vernacular perceptions of pastoral landscapes and the rural idyll
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the perceptions of the rural countryside within the vernacular culture of North America. Two physically similar locations of Southern Ontario and North-east Mississippi were chosen for the study based on their distinctly different political, economic and socio-cultural identities. Within these two locales, three stakeholder groups were studied: those who worked in the rural landscape; those who visited the rural landscape; and those who lived in the rural landscape, for a total of six studies. The dissertation is interdisciplinary in scope and the studies were iterative, using a ' bricolage' (a combination of methodologies, methods, materials, perspectives, and situated responses in a coherent, reasoned approach to a research situation or problem) to create grounded theory. The methods used included surveys, focus groups, interviews, image rankings with photo-manipulated images and modified contingent valuation. The results of this research provide empirical evidence that rural landscapes in vernacular culture encompass a pastoral iconography evoked by perceptions of the rural idyll. The work has also demonstrated that pastoral iconography has emotive or affective dimensions, evoked by both personal nostalgia related to specific landscape types and cultural nostalgia for the pastoral icon, in addition to aesthetic or experiential aspects. Of particular interest was the finding that vernacular perceptions of the rural landscape and larger patterns of landscape iconography showed clear preference for particular typology of forms and were consistent across the two quite different study locales, and may therefore be transferable to other settings. In both locations, and all surveyed groups, it was apparent that the value and importance of the rural environment is held at the level of the subconscious by stakeholders, and is seen as unimportant in relation to other quality of life factors until raised to the level of the conscious, either by a perceived threat or by a conscious decision to seek out an idyllic rural environment. This research has significant implications for rural planning and development. Deeply held cultural views associated with iconographic identity, and emotional attachments which span both locale and individual identity, are powerful factors in the reactions of stakeholder groups to changes in their rural landscape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".