Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation I present the results of comparative ethnographic and spatial research carried out in Alma and Saint-Georges, Québec between August 2015 and July 2016. I chose these cities as field sites in order to study why two populations of nearly equal size (roughly thirty thousand) and extremely similar demographic, economic and social characteristics voted differently since 1976 on the two most salient political cleavages in Québec – the left-right spectrum on economic issues and the question of provincial sovereignty. In the dissertation, I argue three main points. First, the political differences expressed in the voting histories of Alma and Saint-Georges seem to result from the different relationships between government and industrial development in Alma and Saint-Georges. I argue that a majority of people in Alma voted for left-of-centre political parties and for greater provincial sovereignty since 1976 because Alma's economic development was created by international capital that was regulated and planned by provincial authorities. In Saint-Georges, the majority of voters elected right-of-centre political parties and voted for federalism because the city's economic development was largely created by local entrepreneurs and by endogenous sources of capital. The second point I argue is that the relationship between people and their built environments can be used as a material index of political values. Using space syntax methods and Geographic Information Systems, I show that there are measurable spatial differences between Alma and Saint-Georges and explain how these differences reflect the political values of the respective majorities in both cities.The final point I argue is that the political and spatial differences between Alma and Saint-Georges can be considered justifiably cultural. I cover why the culture concept has fallen into disrepute in the discipline of anthropology and argue for its continued relevance. This dissertation could be useful to students and researchers who are interested in voting behaviour, Québec politics, anthropological theory, space syntax methods and the relationship between humanity and its built environment.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".