'Below the Level of the Visible': The Mathematics of Space in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres «SOUS LE NIVEAU DES VISIBLES»: LES MATHEMATIQUES DE L'ESPACE DANS MILLE ACRES DE JANE SMILEY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines Jane Smiley’s presentation of space within a distinctive scientific discourse. It argues that mathematics and other sciences are recruited in A Thousand Acres in a manner that turns literary language into a scientific analysis of the land and the people and by which mechanisekphrasis poses as a distinctive therapeutic m of recall since, after all, the whole narrative is presented as an act of remembering a past along with a specific space. The study also underlines how Smiley questions the validity of science, mainly mathematics. Nonetheless, it concludes that by recruiting the sciences within her ekphrastic style, Smiley underscores that cognitive ekphrastic literature is the domain where the contested sciences and humanities might be allied, and where the sciences might overcome their abstractness and numbness and the humanities achieve a rational background. Keywords: Jane Smiley; A Thousand Acres; Scientific Literature; Ekphrasis; Spatial Literature; American novel
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".