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Record W1935328440 · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511920035.003

The contents of the tin trunk: <i>Ìsarà</i> by Wole Soyinka

2011· book-chapter· en· W1935328440 on OpenAlexaff
Neil ten Kortenaar

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2011
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPostcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCivilizationArtEnlightenmentMythologyModernityIndigenousLiteratureHistoryArt historyPhilosophyArchaeologyTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease , set in the late 1950s, Isaac Okonkwo, the aged father of the protagonist, has a room ‘full of old books and papers – from Blackie's Arithmetic which he used in 1908 to (his son) Obi's Durrell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier’. In the first half of the twentieth century, newly literate Africans often collected and saved all kinds of written material, including printed paper and their own notes and letters, investing these samples of writing with all their hopes for participation in the new field of the modern. Karin Barber has labelled this phenomenon ‘tin-trunk literacy’. Oduche's wooden box imprisons the natural, the sacred, and the indigenous, but a tin trunk filled with papers could be a ‘repository of values, the crystallized tokens and products of “civilization”, “progress”, “enlightenment”, and “modernity”’. Isaac's adult son, Obi, looks with bemusement amounting to disdain on his father's collection, which time and insects have damaged and whose contents time has rendered ‘obsolete’. He sees in the yellowed pages an image of the older generation's outmoded, almost superstitious respect for the missionaries and the products of the colonizer. The title ‘Blackie's Arithmetic ’ refers to the British publisher, but probably strikes the son as colonial condescension that his father had shamefully tolerated.

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.035

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.003
Scholarly communication0.0030.003
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.164
Teacher spread0.133 · 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 designNot applicable
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
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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