Heroes, Villains and Canucks: Constructing Canadian “Otherness” in American Juvenile Sporting Fiction, 1890-1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What did it mean to be a real American boy in the fifty years before World War II? How did that image help define what Americans thought of Canada? This project studies the literary construction of national character in these years through a rich, but underused source: the scores of sports novels and short stories for boys produced during the heyday of the “pulps,” 1890s-1940s. Scholars have identified this popular literature as a vehicle celebrating quintessential American traits; but boys’ sports fiction simultaneously constructed otherness, articulating difference from the American ideal. In those stories that involved winter settings and the sport of ice hockey, almost invariably Canada and Canadians appear. In American hockey stories, the game was used as a canvas on which national cultures were played out, even between cultures as ostensibly similar as Canada and the U.S. This project will examine and interpret the meaning of those depictions, drawing examples from a study of more than 50 novels and 250 short stories.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".