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Record W1983049003 · doi:10.1386/ejac.26.3.199_1

The image of the Maltese falcon: Reconsidering an American icon

2008· article· en· W1983049003 on OpenAlexaff
Douglas Torgerson

Bibliographic record

VenueEuropean Journal of American Culture · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCrime and Detective Fiction Studies
Canadian institutionsTrent University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMetonymyIconMetaphorRomanceLiteratureContrast (vision)Character (mathematics)HistoryArtAestheticsPhilosophyLinguisticsComputer scienceMathematicsGeometryArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The image of the Maltese falcon is an American icon that has made repeated appearances in print, film and elsewhere since it was first presented in the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1929. When we return to Dashiell Hammett's text (published in novel form the following year), we find that this image actually involves a range of multiple images, the significance of which can be probed by considering a stylistic contrast between Hammett and another outstanding Black Mask author, Raymond Chandler. The contrast between Hammett and Chandler becomes especially evident in their different deployments of metaphor and metonymy. Departing from common metaphoric readings, this essay establishes the falcon's metonymic character. The point is not just to show a difference in technique between Hammett and Chandler, but also to demonstrate how Hammett's text carries cultural and political investments that entail a demystification of historical experience while disallowing the quality of redemption prized by the more romantic Chandler.

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: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.106
Threshold uncertainty score0.211

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 studies0.0090.017
Scholarly communication0.0070.003
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.054
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.196 · 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
GenreEmpirical

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 routes1
Has abstractyes

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