Landscapes of conflict: Heritage of the Rideau Canal & Kingston Fortifications World Heritage Site
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2007, the Rideau Canal and the Kingston Fortifications were joined in a single site, but occupy geographically, historically, and phenomenologically different spaces. The inscription, driven by the parochial concerns of property owners along the canal, not by pre-existing federal heritage priorities, deters further development, but perpetuates an ultimately misleading impression of the canal and fortifications. The prevailing narrative sees the canal as an engineering marvel that with the fortifications kept British North America free from American annexation, a fear at the heart of Northrop Frye’s Canadian ‘garrison mentality’. Through a selective use of the visual record — mainly watercolours by British officers contemporary with the construction —, the canal is seen as a tranquil waterway, the preserve of isolated canoeists, not a corridor for steam-powered vessels towing barges, the intended users of the Rideau. It is no surprise then, that the site is today poorly understood by visitors and locals in Kingston, who struggle to connect a canal beyond the urban core with a fortification embedded within a still militarized space, set apart from everyday life. Without strong local understanding of the past connection between the canal and fortifications, one rooted in historical geography, the future protection of both, against a bewildering patchwork of government jurisdictions, and development pressures is uncertain. This dissertation situates the Rideau Canal within the history of British canal construction in its era and shows it as a ‘successful failure’. Certainly an engineering marvel, it was never put into operation militarily, and failed as an economic corridor. It did not lead to canal construction in Canada that used John By’s innovative slackwater techniques and represents an engineering ‘dead end’. Similarly, Kingston’s fortifications never saw action like other major Canadian fortifications but were built and maintained as a bulwark against a feared American expansion that never materialized. Analysis of their development, show that rather than state of the art defenses against an imminent threat, they were constructed mainly as a training exercise during a lull in global British fort-building, and not updated adequately to address the evolving American threat. This re-evaluation of the geography and history of the canal and fortifications does not diminish their heritage value, or global level recognition, but is a starting point for new more inclusive counter-narratives in the 21st century.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.001 |
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".