Terror and Erebus by Gwendolyn MacEwen: White Technologies and the End of Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s verse play Terror and Erebus by considering the play’s representation of technology in light of its own poetic technologies. Terror and Erebus is a play for voices that features four characters: Franklin, Crozier, Rasmussen, and Qaqortingneq. As the character Rasmussen searches for the traces of the lost expedition, imagining the voices of the explorers in their final hours, his investigation reveals how the “white technologies” used to explore the Arctic succumb to the environment without the indigenous knowledge possessed by the Inuit who inhabit the Arctic. The paper shows how MacEwen’s literary vision contrasts recent coverage of efforts to locate the Franklin ships which have ignored or down-played Inuit testimony. Working from Rasmussen’s transcriptions of Qaqortingneq’s voice, MacEwen represents Inuit knowledge and technology as both an alternative to the model of scientific discovery underwriting the Franklin expedition and as source of the authoritative account of what happened to Franklin and his crew.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.003 |
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".