A Moral Dialectic: Shelagh Stephenson’s <i>An Experiment with an Air Pump</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In An Experiment with an Air Pump (1998), Shelagh Stephenson dramatizes a string of conflicts that at once demand and resist resolution – such as past and present, male and female, art and science – and portrays each concept with multiple characters to provide nuanced permutations. Her drama resides in the oppositional pairs personified by her characters, emerging in the clashes between ideologies, in the space of difference – the space that inspires revolution. “When our theatres perform plays of other periods,” writes Bertolt Brecht, “they like to annihilate distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences. But what comes then of our delight in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity – which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves?” (276). Stephenson’s play, set half in the present and half in the past, answers Brecht’s call for distance and echoes his delight in dissimilarity while drawing connections between worlds two-hundred years apart. The simultaneous staging of similarity and difference, past and present, results in a drama that grapples with issues of ethics and interpretation and requires its audience to do the same.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".