The Bystander’s Tale: Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and the Rwandan Genocide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gil Courtemanche’s novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has become a national bestseller not only because of the decision by the author, a Montreal journalist, to use the genre of the novel to convey the story of a genocide, but also because it is, to a large extent, the bystander’s tale; as such, it hit a nerve in Canada – a country tormented by its failure to make a difference in Rwanda. Courtemanche insists the Rwandan genocide could not have happened were it not for world public opinion that settled for the framing of the crisis as a tribal war in Africa. However, it was not the devil but real people killing other real people, and this central assumption turns the Rwandan genocide from an event occurring out there, on a different planet, to one occurring in the political reality we are part of and for which we share responsibility.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".