“I’m a Frog, You’re a Frog, Kiss Me”: A Commentary on Brayton and Alexander (2007)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is irony in my attempt to present a critique of Brayton and Alexander's article (2007) to a largely English-speaking readership.Those who know me will figure out why.In any case, I am writing in this lovely summer of 2007, when the city of Québec is about to celebrate its 400th birthday, when Canada is celebrating 140 years of history, when the 40th anniversary of General de Gaulle's infamous "Vive le Québec libre" is underlined, and when the Québec province is celebrating its 30th Fête nationale.This civic holiday was originally called La Saint-Jean-Baptiste, for the patron saint of French Canadians, but in 1977 the Québec national assembly renamed the holiday to make it more inclusive, to render obsolete the designation Canadien français and to encourage a de-ethnicized and progressive definition of the Québécois nation.Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil . . .Amongst all of these defining identity moments, I was asked to translate the abstract of the Brayton and Alexander article and found myself in the uneasy situation of having to translate in antiquated Canadien français terms what I saw as a Québécois story contextualized and interpreted by English-speaking Canadians.I translated dutifully.As is said in the famous Frog Song written by Jean Chevrier and sang by Robert Charlebois, "I may not look good but I'm well raised and I don't complain."Well, not exactly. . .I was given the opportunity to write this commentary, so here it is.In brief, Brayton and Alexander use the controversial frog logo of Québec City's semiprofessional basketball team to explore irony as a reading strategy and a method of critique.These authors present team owner Réal Bourassa as a "subversive antihero" (p.246) whose ironic use of the frog imagery encourages an alternative and presumably useful reading of mascot controversies.The authors conclude that perhaps the greatest asset of irony is "the extent to which it promotes cultural dialogue around potentially sensitive issues" (p.255).After a careful consideration of their article, I have three main comments.First, Brayton and Alexander must be commended for approaching a difficult topic, for proposing the use of irony, for engaging in a theoretically rich discussion of irony and identity from a poststructuralist perspective, for their search of a new and progressive reading of mascot controversies, and for their goal of promoting cultural dialogue Commentary
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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 | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.034 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".