Classical meets colonial : an exploration of the travel narratives of George\n Best
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thesis (M.A.)--Georgetown University, 2008.; Includes bibliographical\n references. The classical concept of the civilized community, or the civitas, plays a crucial\n role in understanding how English explorers approached the New World and its peoples, as\n documented in the travel narratives that chronicle these meetings. The 1578 narrative of\n George Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for the finding of a passage\n to Cathaya, by the Northweast, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher... portrays the New World\n in an Aristotelian context. Because the Elizabethan sense of community was deeply informed by\n classical texts, Best employs arguments derived from these texts when describing the natives\n he encounters. He treats the Inuit peoples of what is now Newfoundland according to the\n principles of classical philosophy, thus excluding them from civilization, as it was\n understood during the English Renaissance.; I show how Best frames his understanding of\n community based on the Aristotelian civitas, a classical model that included the role and\n responsibility of empire, decided the position of the foreigner or slave, and defined what was\n considered civil. I show classical thought influences how Best treats the concept of\n civilization, especially as it relates to acquisition, labor, control, and most importantly,\n the very nature of the Inuit peoples. In addition, Best works in concert with contemporary\n authors, such as John Stowe and Richard Eden, to define exactly what civilization is. He does\n this in an effort to achieve his primary objective, the so-called "good\n life" for those who dwell within civilization, a central tenet of Aristotle's The\n Politics.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".