“Off to one side of the curve”: Perpetual Expedition and Regional Identity in M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time (1961) has recently received increased critical attention as a “minor” or “unlikely” West Coast classic. Celebrations of the memoir’s portrayal of one woman’s unique and path-breaking experiences voyaging up and down the coastline, however, ignore the ways in which the novel misappropriates First Nations histories and cultures in order to present British Columbia’s coastal wilderness as locked in a permanent phase of discoverability. Commentators on the text, such as Timothy Egan, Cathy Converse, and Nancy Pagh, contribute to a dangerously misleading conception of British Columbia regionalism by conflating Blanchet’s personal experiences with the characteristics of a larger, historically varied, and socially diverse region. In doing so, they ignore more ethically responsible understandings of the region articulated by Laurie Ricou and William G. Robbins, and verge on taking a living history of Euro-Canadian possession and misappropriation as normative.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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 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".