Review of <i>The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands.</i> By Sheila McManus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon the writings of post-structuralists, cultural geographers, and feminist post-colonial scholars, Sheila McManus illustrates that although the West was critical to American and Canadian nation building, the late nineteenth-century Alberta-Montana border remained tenuous and challenged national consolidation on both sides of the line. Three pairs of chapters outline how Canada and the United States tried to incorporate their respective Wests into larger visions of nationhood and make the forty-ninth parallel a meaningful marker for regional residents. The first two chapters illustrate how both governments sought to know and manage their western regions through surveys, maps and land policies. The second pair explores the treatment of the Blackfoot and their responses to white incursions. Even as both countries sought to contain "their" aboriginal peoples on reserves, persistent Indian mobility highlighted the weaknesses of the border and governmental controls. The final two chapters address the linkages between immigration policies, idealized notions of who should settle the West, and who actually came. Assumptions about the western landscape, ethnicity, and gender strongly influenced the formation of government policies, but settler diversity defied federal hopes for the region. Even the arrival of white women- supposedly the final step in the colonization process- challenged the strength and meaning of the nation-state in this western borderland.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".