A Tale of Two (Stuffed) Fish: Coastal Encounters in the Scientific Writings of Sir John Richardson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay delves into the history of two stuffed fish in London’s Natural History Museum. These fish came from opposite ends of the earth: one from southern Australia, the other from northern Canada. But they were both documented and named by a Scotsman, Sir John Richardson (1787–1865). Richardson’s encounters with these fish shed light on different aspects of his career as a naval surgeon, polar explorer, and natural historian. More importantly, though, these encounters also reveal how European knowledge of the world’s coastal environments was created during the Romantic era. In considering the context and consequences of these encounters, this essay reflects on how the subject of this special issue, though nationally defined, connects with broader histories of nineteenth-century exploration and empire. The places where these fish were caught lay well beyond Scotland. Nonetheless, these fish are relevant to the study of Scotland’s coastal Romanticisms, and tracing their history invites us to rethink the geographical assumptions that often govern the study of national pasts.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".