Locating ambivalence : "new light" on the imperial allegory of Alexander Henry the Younger in Canada's fur trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis approaches the imperialist narrative of Alexander Henry the Younger from two perspectives: first, it views the journal from a theoretical distance within a temporal network of related texts, each reflecting and mediating his imperial meanings; second, it sees Henry's work as an isolated text bearing its own imperial inscriptions. With the theoretical guidance of certain post-structuralist and post-colonial works, this thesis will first enter an intertextual field of traditional, popular history, in order to recognize the "central" role that historical narratives such as Henry's continue to play in present historical discourse; then it will attempt a resistant reading of Henry's journal in order to problematize traditional readings and to suggest future approaches. This study is intended to have broader implications for the historical genre of travel writing in Canada. Allegorical theory is used in this thesis to expose the fictionality of both Henry's journal and the scholarly discourse that surrounds it. Henry's discourse is imperialism: his ideologically driven, narrative associations are as much the product of Eurocentric mercantilism as realistic observation; and the traditional, academic climate of his reading has tended to perpetuate that system. In this "light," the meanings of Henry's narrative are seen as fundamentally imposed on the landscape and peoples of his accounts: rather than historic truths of natural history or native culture, they tell more about the ideologies of European imperialism and of the problematic nature of the allegorical "great" man of Western history. This thesis is concerned with the power of representation — particularly the discursive power of certain problematic texts to pose as authentic historical reflection; it seeks to identify such oppressive illusions and dispel them.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".