Glenda Stirling, ed. The NeXtFest Anthology: Plays from the Syncrude Next Generation Arts Festival
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Number 20 in NeWest Press's Prairie Play series, The NeXtFest Anthology, extends a useful tradition of anthologizing smaller works by established and new playwrights to introduce and draw attention to voices that might otherwise go unrecognized. This tradition began with the third entry in the series, Prairie Performance (1980). In the Foreword, General Editor and series founder Diane Bessai wrote of the need to show the "variety of plays shaped by Western regional experience," and her valuable concluding essay, "Prairie Playwrights and the Theatre," provides a pocket history of Western theatre activity over the previous fifty years. Prairie Performance gathers eight plays that span some 42 years and pays homage to careers seemingly past and to voices emerging into a new, more receptive theatre climate: Elsie Park Gowan, Frank Moher, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Joanna M. Glass, Ken Mitchell, W. O. Mitchell, Gordon Pengilly, and Wilfred Watson. That Western regional play writing was anything but homogeneous at the time (or even "flat," as critics of Western or prairie writing in general are so fond of suggesting) is made clear in dramatic styles ranging from romantic folk-play and naturalism to McLuhanesque poetic abstractions that bridge medieval morality with contemporary shopping centre culture.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.060 | 0.036 |
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".