Unclaimed Territory: The Ballad of ‘Auld Robin Gray’ and the Assertion of Authorial Ownership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For the first fifty years of its existence the ballad ‘Auld Robin Gray’ existed as an anonymous work, the author, Lady Anne Lindsay, having decided not to assert authorship when she composed it in 1772. In 1823, at the instigation of Walter Scott, Lady Anne chose to reassert her claim to a text that had by that point moved well beyond the limits of personal control and been subjected to multiple modifications by owners and performers as varied as street singers, operatic composers, and writers of fashionable fiction. The present essay attempts to disentangle both the ballad' complicated textual history and the intricate issues of ownership arising from competing musical settings. By exploring in full detail a remarkably complex instance of contested ownership in a text that still retains its place in modern anthologies and in the repertoires of contemporary singers, the essay seeks to raise questions about anonymity and textual ownership that have far wider implications.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".