Review of <i>Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mappingof the Canadian West</i> By D'Arcy Jenish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Thompson, often known as "the great mapmaker," spent twenty-five years traveling the entire West and Northwest of North America, covering 75,000 miles by canoe, horseback, and foot, and in the process produced the first comprehensive map of this vast region of about 1.2 million square miles. He then spent many years surveying the new 49th parallel boundary between the United States and Canada. D'Arcy Jenish has produced, according to his publisher, the first full-length biography of Thompson-in that previous works have not given much consideration to his early and declining years-and has done a creditable job of following and explaining Thompson's travels in the West. The book describes in some detail how Thompson worked to achieve the precision characteristic of his surveying, the key to which was his innumerable astronomical observations taken with infinite care under often extremely adverse conditions. These allowed Thompson to fix the exact position of thousands of points across the West, which, coupled with his careful running surveys between these points, yielded maps of unprecedented accuracy. The book does not seem to cover much new ground or reveal any new research. There are no new answers to the question of precisely what drove him in 1797 to leave the Hudson's Bay Company and take up with the North West Company, and no new reasons why Thompson suddenly gave up his life in the wilderness in 1812 and started living in the first house of his own as a sedentary farmer and land investor-the latter being what ultimately got him into so much trouble and left him a pauper. And there is nothing new that might explain better why Thompson took so long to reach the mouth of the Columbia in 1810, when his company's-and even his country's-fortunes depended on it. He arrived at the Pacific to find Fort Astoria already built and occupied by the men of Jacob Astor's rival Pacific Fur Company. Has all we are going to uncover about David Thompson already been found?
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
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".