Remediating the Boas/Hunt archive: on ethnographic collections, indigenous ontologies, and the problem of metadata
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Franz Boas's 1897 monograph, The Social Organisation and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to ethnography, use of multiple media, and the collaborative role of Boas’s Indigenous partner George Hunt. The volume drew on museum collections and the two men also left behind a vast and now widely distributed archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this groundbreaking text. This article discusses an international and intercultural project to create a new, annotated critical edition of the book—in both print and digital formats—that reassembles the dispersed materials and re-embeds them within Kwakwakaw̓akw ontologies of both persons and things. Building on Indigenous as well as colonial metadata, our project to reassemble and redescribe widely scattered museum collections and archival materials is facilitating a critical historiography of the book and a reactivation of its content for Indigenous futures.
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 | 0.023 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".