Earle Birney’s “Mappemounde”: Visualizing Poetry With Maps
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is about “Mappemounde,” a beautiful but difficult poem composed in 1945 by the esteemed Canadian poet Earle Birney. While exploring the reasons for its composition, we examine the poem’s debts to Old and Middle English poetry as well as to medieval world maps known as mappaemundi, especially those made in England prior to 1400. But Birney took only so much from these maps. In search of more elusive inspirations, both cartographic and otherwise, we uncover other sources: Anglo-Saxon poems never before associated with “Mappemounde,” maps from the Age of Discovery and beyond, concealed details of Birney’s personal life. Then we trace Birney’s long-standing interest in geography and exploration to show how he used maps, especially mappaemundi, as visual metaphors for his intellectual, spiritual, and personal life.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it