Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the screenplays written by Canadian experimental poet bpNichol for the Jim Henson produced children’s television program Fraggle Rock between 1982 and 1986. Nichol’s Fraggle Rock writing represents a moment in his multi-genre oeuvre at which to observe his poetics and creative philosophies on display in a popular cultural setting. The ludic poetics exhibited in both the form and narratives of the screenplays display the ways in which playful engagement with language may create interactive communities of play. Through shared attitudes towards language, language games, nonsense, and absurdity, play and play communities emerge as a preoccupation of Nichol’s work within the Fraggle Rock narrative constraints, and links them with his poetry and poetics. To explore Nichol’s specific figuring of play, this thesis surveys theories of play from diverse theoretical backgrounds to develop a ludic model based in player-to-player relationships and communication. It also analyzes canonical treatments of play to mark off the concerns of the current study, and address the ambiguities of the term. Nichol’s Fraggle Rock screenplays employ song, language, and poetry as forms of community experience and engagement that foster play relationships, and allow individuals to collectively manipulate the forms of their communication. These language games and language play constitute the Fraggle world of Nichol’s episodes and highlight the play community as a paracosm based in shared manipulation of communicative conventions. Further, this thesis analyzes the ”pataphysical elements of the Fraggle Rock play community in Nichol’s episodes, and how these provide a playfully creative and critical angle with which to view the normative “human” world.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".