Review of <i>The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region</i> edited by Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From 1969 to 1990 the Western Canadian Studies conferences brought together researchers interested in the history of a region defined as "the Prairie West" or simply "the West," often at the University of Calgary. In large measure the conference was an outgrowth of the fractious regional politics of the late 1960s. The range of topics participants explored, however, ultimately went well beyond the limited theme of "western alienation" and made an important contribution to the regional historiography; fourteen volumes of conference papers, usually edited by University of Calgary scholars, were published between 1970 and 1993. In June 2008 a group of historians at the University of Alberta tested the possibility of reviving Western Canadian Studies with a conference titled "The West and Beyond: Historians Past, Present, and Future." The organizers believed it was time for scholars in the field to "rise up, evaluate, and appraise the state of Western Canadian history, acknowledging and assessing the contributions of historians of the past and present while at the same time showcasing the research interests of the next generation."
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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.
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".