The Steel Dog in the Canadian Arctic: A Historical Case Study of Technological Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the "Snowmobile Revolution" of the late 1960s, the snowmobile largely supplanted the dog team as the main form of transport in the Canadian Arctic. This essay draws from historical and ethnograpphic sources to investigate practical advantages and disadvantages to adoption of the new technology, and then considers whether this episode of rapid technological change resulted in "cultural loss" in Arctic communities. While it is clear that widespread adoption of the snowmobile technological complex (machines, fuel, tools, skills, knowledge) caused significant changes in life in the Far North, it also appears that the meanings and values associated with traditional subsistence hunting were generally not lost, and in some cases were reinforced during this period of technological transition. Finally, drawing on various academic traditions such as the Social Construction of Technology school, ecological models of convergent cycles, postmodern critiques of modernization and development, and the appropriate technology movement, the essay then questions simplistic notions of cultural loss by considering the common evolution of culture and technology.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".