Harold Innis’ “Crisis in Public Opinion”: Performance, Retrieval, and the Politics of Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On May 12, 1943, Harold Innis delivered a speech entitled “The Crisis in Public Opinion” at the annual luncheon of the Canadian National Newspapers and Periodicals Association, held in Toronto. The address has survived in transcript form in the Innis Papers collection at the University of Toronto Archives. Our paper can best be seen as a companion piece to the edited transcription of Innis’ original speech, which follows in this issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication. Emphasizing the performative nature of the speech, we contextualize “The Crisis of Public Opinion” by examining the correspondence leading up to and following the speech. We argue that Innis’ views on the “crisis of public opinion” in the print media indicate that he understood this particular issue as part of a broader public crisis related to the decline of political and juridical institutions and to shifts in power and influence. His commentary on media in Canada was bound up with his effort to promote collective engagement as a corrective to the biases in power that he had detected. The 1943 speech is thus significant not simply as a “missing link” between Innis’ writings on Canada and his later work on communication theory; it is a clear and compelling distillation of the engagement, enactment, and performance that were the abiding features of his work as an intellectual.
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 | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".