Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper studies contemporary Canadian death notices, considering the relation of this form of life writing to the public sphere. A genre that intersects the public and private, personal and communal, the death notice constitutes a key site for examining contemporary cultural practices. Instances of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call ‘everyday autobiographies’, death notices show ordinary citizens writing themselves and their loved ones into identities and histories that dominant society has deemed acceptable. In this eulogistic and euphemistic form, generic and societal norms are at work that limit the possibilities for subjects and narratives and dictate who should be mourned and how. In this paper I examine the opportunities within this formulaic genre for telling the life stories of both the deceased and the survivors and for creating individual and collective identities that reflect multiple communities and generations. I consider as well the idea(l)s of subjectivity and nation that this popular form circulates and reinforces.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".