An Unacknowledged Publication by Sylvia Plath
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AN unacknowledged publication by Sylvia Plath has been discovered in joint research investigations.1 An unidentified magazine publication is referred to by Plath in a letter to her mother dated 9 November 1961: I’ll send for a copy of my awful first ladies’ magazine story—very stiff and amateurish. It came out my birthday week. I got a very sweet fan letter for it in which the woman, also a writer, took me for an expert on Canada and Whitby, the sailing port I visited for a day. Very flattering! …2 Smith College also holds a draft manuscript of ‘The Lucky Stone’. From reading this it was possible to verify that this was indeed the story Plath discusses in Letters Home through the protagonist Joanna's association with Canada (‘She might even, she thought longingly, be home in Canada again’), and, although the town is not named explicitly, the description of Whitby (‘The few remaining visitors hadn’t yet come down to stroll along the harbour from where the fishing fleet anchored, or across the bridge leading to the old section of the town under the ruined abbey perched atop its headland like a great, grey seabird.’).3 Plath's Chalcot Square address appears on the draft, dating it to sometime between January 1960 and August 1961. Also on the draft, in Plath's handwriting, is ‘Sold £15.15.0 by Jennifer Hassell’. An entry for Jennifer Hassell was located in Plath's address book, also held in Smith College. Hassell's business address was care of A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd., then located at 35 Dover Street, London W1, which suggests that she was Plath's agent in these transactions.4
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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 | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.321 | 0.210 |
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".