Patricia Demers, Naomi McIlwraith, and Dorothy Thunder. the Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Patricia Demers, Naomi McIlwraith, and Dorothy Thunder. The Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010. 457 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Illustrations. $100.00 hc. In 1876, Roman Catholic missionary Emile Grouard returned to his mission field in the Athabasca region from a trip to France, equipped with a Stanhope printing press, sets of copperplate for illustrations and type for syllabics, and a few months' training in their use. By 1883, he had printed a 224-page book in Plains Cree, using syllabics and containing the fundamentals of the Oblate order's beliefs and practises for the people of Athabasca. This unusual book is, as its subtitle notes, A Facsimile Edition and Translation of a Prayer Book in Cree Syllabics. A collaboration between an English scholar and Cree speakers and linguists, it is clearly the result of lengthy, determined, and careful labour. The translators provide brief introductory essays and an afterword in which they note the current tensions over the contested fields of mission work and language retention, situate the text in the history of Father Grouard's work among the Dene and Cree, and provide a detailed and transparent discussion of the challenges of the translation process. Most of the book, however, is an interesting experiment in producing and reproducing an historical text. Each page of Grouard's original book is presented as part of a two-page spread. A facsimile of the original page is printed on the left, with an English translation of the Cree beside it. On the right-hand side of the layout, the translators provide two transcriptions of the syllabics in Roman characters: one a direct transcription from the original syllabics, and the other transcribed into modern standard rendering of Plains Cree. While I am in no position to evaluate the skill of the translations and transcriptions, the careful explanation of the process in the afterword leaves me confident that every care was taken to deal with the obvious challenges. Grouard gave his book the title Catholic Prayer Book, but it contains much more than standards such as the Lord's Prayer, the Hall Mary and various creeds and collects. There are the Ten Commandments, instructions for contemplations during mass and at the Stations of the Cross, the questions and answers of the catechism, and lessons from the Bible. There are instructions on the proper thoughts to accompany various church ceremonies and the words for 71 hymns, together with the names of appropriate tunes for each. Grouard clearly attempted to translate his theological beliefs into concepts that made sense in Cree, and a careful reading of his prayer book provides insight into his particular brand of religion. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".