“Little Known and less Frequented”: colonialism and conceptions of the environment in nineteenth-century British-Canadian imperial thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis presents case studies in imperial relationships with nineteenth-century Canadian environments. First, it tackles perceptions from the centre of the British empire through the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), a group of philanthropists who promoted the civilizing mission. The APS propagated their perception of the environment as tameable which had direct consequences for Indigenous people. The second case utilizes the anti-conquest framework to evaluate how travel literature by British writers transformed a partially tamed wilderness into an Eden for hunters, setting the groundwork for further colonization of the environment. The final case examines the writings of Canadian intellectuals to show how the inheritors of empire used environment, and more specifically, climate, to intensify boosterism. This thesis contends that although these cases may seem disparate at first reading, they are linked by the perception of Canadian environment and climate as conquerable, providing another way for the empire to justify its existence
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".