Review of <i>Transcontinental America, 1850•1915, Volume 3 of The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History</i> by D. W. Meinig
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The editors of the Journal of Historical Geography considered the publication of the third volume of Donald Meinig's "magisterial historical geography" to be so important as to merit a sixteen-page special feature: an account of the project by the author followed by invited commentaries by Cole Harris and Carville Earle (JHG, January 1999). Meinig explains that "America" refers to the United States, though "other Americas" (Canada, Mexico, Panama, etc.) are considered in presenting it in "a broader geographic context... ." The Shaping in the series title announces an emphasis on "form, morphology, spatial patterns, [and] geographic structure"; in the author's opinion, the United States is "one of the greatest exhibits of the continuous reshaping of the human geography of areas." Meinig's overriding concerns are "with the imposition of order upon areas, with the location of various kinds of places and connections between them, with distinguishing features of constituent areas, and with spatial systems that give rise to more general patterns." He acknowledges that the "great landforms map of Erwin Raisz and broad patterns of soil, vegetation, and climate are ever in sight or in mind as I write." But Meinig is in no sense a latter-day environmental determinist.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".