David Ross McCord (1844-1930) : imagining a self, imagining a nation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is about the life of David McCord and the contribution he made to Canadian public memory as founder of the McCord Museum of National History. In his McGilI-sponsored museum, founded in 1921, McCord sought to promote a myth of Canadian origins with narration provided by the objects of his personal collection. Integral to this history was the story of the McCord family, their arrival on this continent and their rise to social prominence. In McCord's version of Canadian history, family and personal myth were conflated with that of nation. Viewed through the prism of his collecting and museum work, McCord's life does not easily fit the Carlylean frame adopted by most biographers. In Canadian biographical writing by historians, the 'truth' about a person's life is revealed by following the modernist recipe of painstakingly recreating a detailed chronology of the individual's life. The approach followed here is an important departure from traditional political biography. Entry into McCord's life does not occur at his biological birth date, but at the moment of his own self-fashioned 'birthing', with the opening of the museum realized near the end of his life. In this biographical strategy, McCord's museum acts as a theatre of memory, where fragments of his life story are reassembled to create a narrative of national origins and of personal redemption. In his selection of objects and their display, and in the creation of an archive and the museum itself, McCord left a very elaborate and lasting record of his response to a set of changes associated with industrialization, a process which, in his lifetime, radically transformed the Montreal of his parents' generation. This thesis traces the connection between the creation of a public museum, founded to promote a collective vision of the Canadian past, and the private world of one collector whose collecting practice was defined as much by his own desire to remember and be remembered as it was by the kinds of objects he collected. What makes David McCord's life and collection so compelling is the opportunity it provides from understanding national history from the intimate perspective of one individual.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".