36th International Byron Society Conference 'Byron and the Book' Boston, 26–31 July 2010
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I skipped St Andrews, passed on Paris and missed Messolonghi, so I was particularly looking forward to this year's International Byron Society Conference in Boston. The theme was 'Byron and the Book'. This seemingly straightforward title was actually cleverly chosen to encompass a number of interests. It reflects the recent trend towards 'Book History' in literary criticism, which encourages us to pay attention to the physical books in which literary texts are incarnated. In some respects, academic critics may still be catching up with the Byronic amateurs here, many of whom have an enviable knowledge of early Byron editions. The conference theme also reflects Byron's own concern with the physical production of his books: '[Murray] wants it in Quarto, which is a cursed unsaleable size', he complained while Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was at the printers. The conference began with three papers on Byron's appearances in fiction. D. Michael Jones (Connecticut) presented an analysis of Byronic afterlives in the romance revival of the 1880s, G. Todd Davis (Kentucky State) drew on his extensive survey of novels featuring Byronic elements to discuss the persistence of fictionalised Byrons and William Lofdahl (Marquette) examined the Byronic figure of the Regency villain in Catherine Gore's Cecil. The second panel, on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, was composed of graduate students. Lauren Neefe (SUNY Stony Brook) considered epistolarity in the poem, Matthew Ocheltree (Harvard) examined its dialectic of stasis and renewal and Elizabeth Rees (Fordham) read Canto III as engaging with the impossible demands placed on a sequel both to repeat the original and to innovate. A notable feature of this conference was the two roundtable discussions on editing organised by Andrew Stauffer (Virginia) and touchingly dedicated by him to the memory of Andrew Nicholson, who could always be relied upon to enliven the Byron conferences he attended in the past. The first roundtable had a digital flavour, and included presentations by five editors. David Radcliffe (Virginia Tech) introduced his work on the digital archive, Lord Byron and his Time (lordbyron.org). Neil Fraistat (Maryland), editor of Shelley and of the Romantic Circles website, described his wish list for future digital editions and online archives. Paul Curtis (Moncton), who is working on a digital edition of Byron's correspondence based on new transcriptions from the original documents, described the rigours of text encoding and its potential for creating new kinds of reading. Juli McLoone (Texas at San Antonio) described her work on the Leigh Hunt letters at the University of Iowa, a project that found an innovative solution to funding shortfalls by crowd-sourcing the transcription of numerous documents. All five contributors shared an enthusiasm for the potential of digital editions to become powerful new tools for reading and scholarship, but they all also emphasised the enormous labour required to produce editions that are reliable, durable and fully searchable. A panel on 'Byron and the Good Book' followed, with fascinating papers by Wolf Hirst (Haifa) and Gale Bouchard (Moncton). Hirst - along with Bernard Beatty, Travis Looper and others - has long been showing us in detail how well Byron knew the Bible, and how seriously he took it. Hirst pointed out that Cain, although it was widely condemned as heretical and even blasphemous, follows Genesis almost word for word. Once you realise that, of course, you start to look at the points where Byron's paraphrase differs from scripture. Hirst and Bouchard both picked out one example in particular. In the King James Bible, when the angel asks him where his brother is, Cain says 'Am I my brother's keeper?'; in Cain, he says 'Am I then my brother's keeper?'. The tiny addition turns his question from an insolent rhetorical rejoinder into an express of Cain's dawning awareness of the nature of the violation he has committed. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.347 | 0.139 |
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".