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Record W1563984475

A Human Conversation about Goodness: Carol Shields's Unless

2009· article· en· W1563984475 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Margaret Steffler

Bibliographic record

VenueStudies in Canadian Literature · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicShort Stories in Global Literature
Canadian institutionsTrent University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSilenceConversationDenialSociologyDistancingBeggingPsychologyPsychoanalysisArtLawAestheticsCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)CommunicationMedicinePolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Asked whether she believed in God, Carol Shields answered, “No. Human goodness is the only thing I believe in.”  Human goodness is challenged in Shield’s novel Unless by the self-immolation of one woman and the physical and mental damage to another who tries to help her. The burns left on Norah’s hands inscribe her attempt to reach across the barriers of her normalized culture to help a woman in a burning burka, but the catastrophe reduces both women to silence. Norah sits wordlessly on a street corner in Toronto with the word “GOODNESS” written on a sign hanging around her neck and a begging bowl in her lap. The hurried desire of her family to move beyond the incident and reintegrate her into upscale Toronto normalcy risks not only a denial of Norah’s altered state but also an erasure of the unidentified and unidentifiable dead woman who haunts the text.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.452
Threshold uncertainty score0.910

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0300.016
Scholarly communication0.0050.003
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0040.010
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.301
Teacher spread0.271 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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