Bibliographic record
Abstract
The celebration of birthdays, the marking of anniversaries, has become conventional in academic journals and associations. As Errol Durbach wrote in his afterword to the last issue of Modern Drama (49.3), a special issue to mark the centennial of Ibsen's death, “2006 links Ibsen and Beckett, coincidentally, by accidents of death and birth—‘things dying’ and ‘things new-born’ held in unlikely fusion by our subliminal need to celebrate significant centenaries or by our habitual scholarly inclination to find significance in the serendipitous.” To honour Beckett's centennial, Modern Drama, in conjunction with the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, sponsored a Distinguished Lectures series, featuring talks by S.E. Gontarski, Enoch Brater, and Herbert Blau, all of which appear as articles in this special issue. But it is worth reflecting on our need to “celebrate significant centenaries” – to ask what makes them “significant,” to consider what Beckett in particular has to teach us about this curious habit, and to look specifically at how his dramatization of the habitual study of an author on his birthday can inform our own critical practice.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".