MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Displaced Majority: Robertson Davies and the Euro‐Canadian Diaspora

2008· article· en· W1906115338 on OpenAlexaffabout
Nina Varsava

Bibliographic record

VenueOrbis Litterarum · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Identity and History
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTrilogyDepictionDiasporaNarrativeIdentity (music)ConsciousnessHistoryNational identityRelation (database)SociologyAestheticsGender studiesLiteraturePolitical scienceLawArt historyArtPhilosophyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This essay discusses constructions of Canadian identity. Throughout the nation's history, many Canadians of European descent have defined themselves in relation to Europe (and the United States), rather than developing a sense of independent national identity. In his writing – both fiction and nonfiction – Robertson Davies, a preeminent late twentieth‐century Canadian writer, evocatively portrays this Euro‐Canadian ‘‘diasporic consciousness.’’ Through an exploration of his Deptford Trilogy, in particular the first and most celebrated novel of the series –Fifth Business (1970) – I analyze Davies's depiction of Euro‐Canadian sensibilities. I also relate Davies's trilogy to the perspectives of other Canadian writers – past and contemporary – which demonstrate similar Eurocentric sentiments. I question why European‐descended Canadians, even those many generations removed from Europe, still cling to their European heritage: why they resist a definition of Canada that is grounded in history and culture native to Canadian soil. In the essay, I evaluate the nostalgia of Euro‐Canadians for a European past. While acknowledging that this nostalgia is in many ways understandable and even inescapable, I also argue that, in order to develop the inclusive and unifying identity that Canada lacks, Canadians of all backgrounds must take more interest in the historical narratives and nuances that make Canadian society complex, unique, and worthy of deep exploration.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.080
Threshold uncertainty score0.218

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0220.008
Scholarly communication0.0070.002
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.208
Teacher spread0.197 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2008
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueOrbis LitterarumSame topicCanadian Identity and HistoryFrench-language works237,207