The Fear of Being Unknown: First World War Identification Discs in the Canadian War Museum’s Collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract : The Canadian War Museum holds nearly 250 identification discs from Canadian soldiers and nurses of the First World War. Identification discs were objects of bureaucracy, designed to ensure accurate record keeping of the dead and their places of burial. But these discs were more than just an administrative tool, they represented the hopes and fears of soldiers and their loved ones—the hope of being identified in death and the fear of being one of the missing. Military authorities understood the importance of a known grave to soldiers and their families so burial policy evolved over the war to address these concerns. Although the conditions of the Western Front made the consistent application of policy difficult, the identification discs in the museum’s collection represent how military bureaucracy and individual soldiers adapted to life in the trenches. Sommaire: Le Musée canadien de la guerre possède environ 250 plaques d’identité canadiennes ayant appartenu à des soldats et à des membres du personnel infirmier qui ont servi pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Les plaques d’identité étaient des objets bureaucratiques qui permettaient d’identifier les militaires qui mouraient et de répertorier les endroits où se trouvaient leurs sépultures, contribuant ainsi à la bonne tenue des dossiers. Mais ces plaques étaient plus qu’un outil administratif, car elles représentaient les espoirs et les craintes des militaires et de leurs proches – l’espoir de l’identification en cas de décès et la crainte de figurer parmi les personnes disparues. Puisque les autorités militaires comprenaient l’importance d’une sépulture connue pour les militaires et leurs familles, la politique d’inhumation a évolué au cours de la guerre pour tenir compte de ces préoccupations. Bien que les conditions sur le front de l’Ouest aient rendu l’application de la politique difficile, les plaques d’identité dans la collection du Musée témoignent de l’adaptation de la bureaucratie militaire et de chaque militaire à la vie dans les tranchées.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 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".