Sound, Silence, Music, and Place along the Wolastoq (Saint John River)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a multinatural ethnography of sound and sense of place along the lower Wolastoq (Saint John River). This river is the unceded territory of the Indigenous Wolastoqey Nation that is now the settler occupied Atlantic Canadian province of New Brunswick. I position the Wolastoq, its tributary rivers, and other bodies of water as sounding subjects alongside their Indigenous and settler inhabitants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic work with humans—interviews, participant-observation, performance attendance, volunteer work, and the like—my analysis also relies on sound recordings, photos, and videos made during my explorations of rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, and puddles throughout the lands of the Wolastoq. I fuse these two approaches together to theorize the entangled sonic relationships between waters and humans, and I detail these relationships through a close description of sound and sensory experience. I am a settler working on Indigenous land and water, so my engagements with Wolastoqey territory, people, and knowledge were supervised by local Wabanaki Elder and Water Grandmother, Cecelia Brooks. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Each analyzes one dimension of sounded experience along the Wolastoq. The first chapter is an ethnography of sound and listening that presents the Wolastoq itself as an ethnographic subject with a uniquely riverine voice. The second listens intently to silence and quiet as the acoustic links between humans and one of the Wolastoq’s tributaries. The third brings together musical moments from up and down the river to understand how human expressive culture is shaped by the river. The fourth and final chapter weaves my attempt to build a collaborative sound map into a larger conversation about ethnomusicology, cartography, and settler-colonialism. Taken together, these chapters represent a confluence of sonic experience that exists between rivers and the humans who inhabit them. Like the Wolastoq itself, this dissertation is the place where these different streams of experience meet and become entangled with each other.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".