Bibliographic record
Abstract
The time has come for new scholarship in book history, given the development of the discipline and the current national project for the History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada. Although a research infrastructure exists, there is no sustained analysis of newspapers, which were one of the most accessible genres of print in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada. This thesis begins to fill the gap with a case study of Toronto newspapers from 1798 to 1845, that is, from the time of the first press to mid-century when eleven newspapers were being published in the city. In its analysis of newspapers the present study draws upon the approaches of analytical and historical bibliography and those of social history. In order to understand the methods of newspaper production and distribution, it gathers physical evidence from the newspapers' format—the form, size, paper, typography and illustrations—and from published announcements from proprietors/editors. This information is complemented by documentation from archival sources, such as printers' memoirs and correspondence, shop account books and ledgers, and publications of the provincial government. The study contributes to book history scholarship by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper content to determine the kinds of information newspapers provided, their function in the circulation of news, and their role in the advancement of print culture. Between 1798 and 1845, thirty-two newspapers were launched in Toronto, fifteen of which endured for five or more years. The proprietors of these newspapers worked within a network of colleagues, which facilitated the exchange of information and the use of common techniques in newspaper production and news presentation. As a result, in this period the newspaper evolved from a government-controlled organ carrying official announcements and news from abroad to an instrument of readers, providing them with information they wanted and needed about the world, their province and their community, while at the same time uniting them by publishing common interests and concerns. By thus fostering a readership, newspapers emerged as a very significant factor in the advancement of print culture in Upper Canada.
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 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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".