“Draw a Squirrel Cage”: The Politics and Aesthetics of Unemployment in Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a paucity of fictional depictions of and critical engagement with class and work in Canadian literature, a fact that makes study of Irene Baird’s 1939 novel, Waste Heritage , doubly worthwhile. This neglected text draws heavily on the Canadian class struggles of the late 1930s and, in a muted metafictive spirit, grapples with how best to convey them in writing. Through her writer figure, Kenny Hughes, Baird questions the efficacy of a traditionally bourgeois, individualist genre like the novel to express working-class, collective dissent. Baird focuses on select characters that, though individuated, function as the “everyperson.” The formal preoccupations and social consciousness of her novel render it not only a valuable record of an epoch in Canada’s history, but also an increasingly relevant literary model for understanding and reacting to class relations in the age of multinational capitalism.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".