Nature, Indigenous and empire in José Mariano Mociño's Noticias de Nutka (1793)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following thesis offers an interpretation of Noticias de Nutka, written by José Mariano Mociño, after he visited Nootka, on the Western coast of Vancouver Island. Mociño was a Mexican naturalist in the team of the Royal Scientific Expedition to New Spain organised in 1792 by the Spaniard crown to explore the territories beyond California, which were considered as part of its domains. The book, prepared in the next year (1793), is the most complete approach of its time to the area’s people and culture in Spanish literature and can be considered as part of the testimonial corpus of first European-Indigenous encounters on the Canadian Pacific coast, besides the most known texts by James Cook or George Vancouver. This study focuses on the representation of nature and natives of Nootka and analyses the apparent contradiction between the goals of the scientific mission and Mociño’s recommendation for the Europeans powers to prevent colonizing the Northwest coast. By discussing those elements, the thesis explores the relation between the discourses of natural history and Spanish imperialism at the end of the Eighteenth Century. The interpretative proposal developed by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation serves as the main theoretical framework for the analysis presented here, although I show how it needs to be modified when applied to Mociño’s context. In sum, the thesis reveals the “colonial ambiguity” that distinguishes Mociño’s positionalities in relation to his subject of study and Spanish imperial expansion, considering that feature as part of the construction of scientific discourse and Creole identity in New Spain.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".