Folklife and superstition the luck, lore, and worldviews of prairie homesteaders
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"A captivating history of folk traditions, beliefs, and culturally diverse customs in the early homesteading era on the Canadian Prairies. The homesteading era on the Canadian Prairies (1867–1914) was a dynamic period of history, when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, migrating primarily from northwestern and eastern Europe, descended nascent provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Some were lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership, while others were fleeing war, famine, and persecution. Homesteaders have been studied and written about extensively, often within the context of "settling" the Canadian West and the displacement of Indigenous populations. These narratives, while crucial to our understanding of Canada’s national identity and colonial past, tend to obscure the personal stories, beliefs, and mindsets of those individuals who came to this part of the world and made a life there. Drawing on a treasure trove of archival sources, historian Sandra Rollings-Magnusson presents a vivid and deeply personal collection of Prairie folklife, revealing stories full of humour, superstition, fear, and hope. She gives insight into homesteaders’ daily lives, including instances of water-witching, signs of good and bad luck, neighbourly practical jokes, and popular pastimes. Through adaptation, hardship, homesickness, and a sense of adventure, they built communities with others from different backgrounds, creating a unique culture that blended the old with the new."--
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.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it