Following the Current: A Bioregional History of the Fox River from the Pleistocene to the Present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In fall 2022, IMSA’s Mod 8 History of the Environment class wrote a book. Specifically and collaboratively, we wrote a bioregional history of the Fox River watershed. Although there are several waterways in the Midwest with the same name, our Fox River originates near Colgate, Wisconsin, northwest of the city of Milwaukee. From its headwaters, the Fox runs due south and then southwest more than 200 miles, before reaching its confluence with the Illinois River near Ottawa. This includes the section flowing two-miles due east of IMSA’s campus, through the city of Aurora. All told, the entire Fox River watershed drains almost 2,700 square miles of Wisconsin and Illinois. As part of this project, students had the opportunity to design a historical research project based on their own interests. Topics ranged from the geological impacts of the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended 13,000 years or so ago, through nineteenth century industrial concerns and twentieth century recreation, to modern issues such as pollution, dam removal proposals, and legal rights for nature. Students also helped with the editing process and book construction, including original cover art and design, author bios, and the collection of appropriate maps and photographs. Four historians—experts in the field of environmental history—read our book and provided review blurbs for the back cover. This bioregional history of the Fox is both unique and incomplete. To date, this is the first academic history of this particular Fox River, making it a valuable contribution to the environmental history of the United States. There is, however, a lot more history to discover along the Fox River. The second edition is planned for fall 2023!
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 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".