Please Pass the Crumpets … er, Croissants: Teaching Québec in Victoria, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Sanctioned Ignorance (2013), based on his doctoral thesis in comparative literature (University of Alberta), Paul William Martin provides an overview of “the teaching of the literatures of Canada.” Framed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of “the market of symbolic goods” and based on fieldwork which consists of in-depth interviews with professors in French and English university departments and an examination of university calendars, his work offers a fascinating “snapshot” of the teaching of our literatures. Over several pages, Martin investigates and comments upon the unique program that I run at the University of Victoria: the undergraduate degree in comparative Canadian literature, jointly offered by the departments of English and French. This highly specialized undergraduate degree concentrates on classic literary texts from English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Québec (with subfields in Québec cinema and Québec history and various courses on culture and literature: Cartier and Champlain; graphic novels; Métis, migrant, and Amerindian writing; fine art; and so on). In this article, I propose the advantages of such a program to the future of the study of Québec in Canada, examine the challenges I have faced in maintaining this program over the past twenty-five years, and reflect on the teaching of the literature and culture of Québec in an anglophone university in the city that is identified as being “more British than the British”: Victoria, British Columbia.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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.
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".