Reflections of War: Changes in Tactics and Technology in the Diaries and Memoirs of Canadian Soldiers 1916-1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Great War was in many ways a conflict defined by technology. The rapid advancements in technology over the decades leading up to 1914 coupled with the outdated tactics employed by all sides created the stalemate of Trench Warfare. Improvements to the existing technology, the addition of new technology, as well as an evolution in tactics led to the breakout, and eventual Allied victory, of 1918. These changes in tactics and technology significantly affected the lives of frontline soldiers. This thesis asks if the tactical and technological changes, in the final two years of the war, were reflected in diaries and memoirs of Canadian soldiers serving at the front. The diaries and memoirs of the soldiers do reflect many of the changes found in the secondary sources. Surprisingly, however, the primary sources often provide more detail about how these weapons were employed by the Germans. Unless the soldier in question was directly involved in their use, or was witnessing a spectacular event, accounts of Canadian artillery, machine gun and poison gas use are often short and lacking in detail.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".