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Record W2082013948 · doi:10.3138/utq.83.1.28

Postcard Poem, Ekphrastic Delusion: On Margaret Atwood’s Poem “Postcard”

2014· article· en· W2082013948 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Shahar Bram

Bibliographic record

VenueUniversity of Toronto Quarterly · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicComics and Graphic Narratives
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoetryImpossibilityDelusionObject (grammar)ArtNothingFace (sociological concept)LiteraturePsychoanalysisPsychologyPhilosophyLawEpistemologyLinguistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In her poem “Postcard,” Margaret Atwood chooses postcards and tourism as an entry point to examine relationships, the loss of a loved one, and the fading of memory. The poem exploits the unique format of the postcard and sophisticatedly uses the delusion typical of the ekphrastic tradition, which constructs an object that lacks ontological reality but is impressively present in the imagination of the reader. The poem, we find, grew because of the impossibility of restoring the face of the beloved figure; it is a poem about failure, about the limitations of the verbal medium when confronting the collapse of visual memory. Is the mechanism of personal relationships equivalent to the industry of tourism? In what way does the mental picturesque reproductions of the beloved we store in our memory resemble commercial postcards?

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.018

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.018
Scholarly communication0.0060.005
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.176
Teacher spread0.167 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2014
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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