A Republic of Pawprints: The Rise and Reign of the Alaskan Sled Dog, 1870-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation charts the career of the Alaskan sled dog: how it was used as an engine of development, how it became a symbol for early American Alaska, and how it fell victim to obsolescence as newer and faster means of conveyance became available. The figure of the sled dog in the Arctic is complex. Because it was closer to the wolf in phenotype both it, and Alaska, were buffeted by the same White settler expectations and Darwinian chauvinism which afflicted its Indigenous peoples. This would intensify during the baptisms by fire of the gold rushes. Dog abuse – overwork, starvation, deprivation, injury, and too often death – haunt the annals of this upending period of Alaska and Yukon history. Yet, using dog labor as fulcrum, this event set Alaska – heretofore a far-flung outpost – unto a viable economic path. It was clear that the dog would serve as the supreme tool to blaze this very path. Eventually, all of these same paths led to Nome – a city founded by dogsleds. It was in Nome that the popular perceptions of mushing begin to coalesce. These were fueled originally by practical needs, but the desire to improve the dog-musher bond pushed enterprising Nomeities to creating dogsled races, the crown jewel of which was the All Alaska Sweepstakes. For twenty years, Nome was the center of the new canine universe which allowed the fledgling District, and then Territory, to claim for itself an unique identity in the world. The Nome Serum Run of 1925 cemented the figure of the sled dog in Alaska. However, very soon after, with the advent of new technologies, this symbol would be threatened and then overthrown. A way of life would be rapidly undone and then forgotten. But because the sled had such deep roots in Alaska, its eventual rebirth in the Iditarod starting in the 1970s was enthusiastically welcomed by a public that, while complicit in its disappearance, had missed it all the same. Thereafter, the sled dog became symbolic in increasingly unique, and sometimes bizarre ways – but always, at its heart, a quintessentially Alaskan creature.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".