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Record W7116716499 · doi:10.3366/lih.2025.0207

‘I have one in my Musæum’: Marmaduke Tunstall, George Allan, and the <i>British Zoology</i>

2025· article· en· W7116716499 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Andrew Brown

Bibliographic record

VenueLibrary & Information History · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Natural History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGeorge (robot)WindsorWhite (mutation)NewspaperEstateNatural (archaeology)Natural history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Gilbert White spoke of his hopes that the Natural History of Selborne (1789) would inspire other ‘stationary men’ to join him in writing down their observations of nature in their immediate surroundings. In the north-east of England, Marmaduke Tunstall (1743–90) made a great effort in recording curious sightings near his estate at Wycliffe, interleaving his copy of Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology with extensive notes. These notes are now in Canada, largely detached from their original context. An eight-volume transcript was completed by George Allan of Darlington following Tunstall’s death. The notes were supplemented with additional illustrations, newspaper articles, and further observations and remain interleaved within a copy of the Zoology. This article follows a chronological approach detailing Tunstall’s and Allan’s connections to their local natural history community at the end of the eighteenth century, exploring the content of the two sets and their afterlife and demonstrating evidence that the transcript now at Windsor was used by Thomas Bewick in preparation for the History of British Birds (1797–1804).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.985
Threshold uncertainty score0.333

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0150.007
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.157
Teacher spread0.149 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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