Review of <i>Saskatchewan: A New History</i> By Bill Waiser
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill Waiser's sweeping narrative of the history of Canada's most identifiable agricultural province was published as part of Saskatchewan's centennial celebrations. Wonderfully written in an authoritative but engaging style, Waiser's "Saskatchewan" is a story of challenge where buoyant hopes and dashed dreams were acted out by generations of people whose origins and backgrounds were as diverse as the physical environment they settled. Two dominant themes underpin Waiser's narrative. The first is the enduring presence of a rural order built around "King Wheat," one that through the years, in both good times and bad, became the focus around which Saskatchewan defined its identity and future. Using a successful blend of narrative and analysis, Waiser demonstrates how Saskatchewan rose to national prominence via the production and export of wheat. Especially convincing is his discussion of the various official strategies taken to support this rural order in lean times, and more latterly how the province is struggling to remake itself in an age of significant change in the nature and importance of farming (and agriculture itself). Waiser also successfully paints a vivid picture of Saskatchewan's multicultural society. He covers familiar ground as he details the various waves of European immigrants who settled Saskatchewan and lifted it to a lofty position in 1927 as the country's third most populace province and, arguably, the best example of rural Canadian ethnic diversity. However, Waiser is very critical of the treatment suffered by those who did not cleave to Anglo-Saxon values and norms. And while documenting the official sanctions generally accorded these nativist sentiments, he is most critical of the injustices endured by Saskatchewan's aboriginal peoples. Waiser pursues this theme consistently throughout his narrative, and it emerges as one of its strongest features. Also of note is his discussion of women and their overlooked status.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
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".