Before the Boundary Waters Treaty: Irrigation Experts and International Controversy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1909, the International Joint Commission has administered the Boundary Waters Treaty between Canada and the United States. Successful cooperation was not guaranteed, however. This article examines how efforts to establish a commission for international waters rose and fell between 1894 and 1900. Initial concerns centered on shared rivers in Montana and Alberta. Although Canada raised the prospect of an international commission in 1896 it did not materialize. However, the idea was resuscitated in 1900 through correspondence by irrigation experts from the United States and Canada: Elwood Mead and John Dennis, respectively. These individuals had leading roles in their respective countries and were also part of larger circuits of knowledge exchange. Efforts to expand those exchanges to international waters, however, created a small diplomatic controversy. Setting these episodes in the broader context of international knowledge exchange, I consider what they reveal about how international waters figured in efforts to advance settler societies.
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 | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".