Review of <i>The Prairie West as Promised Land.</i> Edited by R.\nDouglas Francis and Chris Kitzan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This collection of eighteen essays explores the "ways in which the Prairie West was identified as a Promised Land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." In one variant, western Canada became a place where individuals could escape from the stresses of urban and industrial society in Europe or the United States and find a land of natural abundance, full of God's bountiful riches that would be bestowed on those worthy of living there, the "Chosen People." This imaginary construct, Doug Owram points out, was first advanced by those who lobbied successfully for Canada to acquire Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company. A later proponent, Chris Kitzan argues, was George Exton Lloyd, an Anglican clergyman who helped establish an all-British settlement in what is now Saskatchewan in 1903 and in the 1920s endlessly warned Canadians that the West's British character was being undermined by a flood of immigrants from central and eastern Europe who could never be assimilated.\nWestern Canada also came to be imagined as a region where it would be possible to create the ideal or perfect society. This notion was most strongly espoused by those influenced by the Social Gospel, such as Nellie McClung and]. S. Woodsworth, as the essays by Randi Warne and Douglas Francis make clear. But it also found expression in a wide variety of utopian communities (and city plans), as Anthony Rasporich demonstrates in his two contributions to this collection. In anQther essay, Bradford Rennie argues that utopian ideals also inspired the agrarian reform movement in Alberta, giving rise to Henty Wise Wood's notion of "group government" in 1919 and the creation of the Alberta Wheat Pool in 1923.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.006 |
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".