Dramatizing Biographers: Michael Meyer’s <i>A Meeting in Rome</i> and Robert Ferguson’s <i>Dr. Ibsen’s Ghosts</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using two plays that fictionalize the life of Henrik Ibsen, Michael Meyer’s A Meeting in Rome (1991) and Robert Ferguson’s Dr. Ibsen’s Ghosts (1999), as its primary texts, this article examines the broader ethical implications of staging the lives of real people and the implications, in particular, of inserting biographer–characters into dramatic works about the lives of real people. It aims to bring to light the ways in which biographer–characters in dramatic works written by biographers complicate the status of the biographer as a historical authority. Whereas Meyer actively seeks to strengthen his authoritative voice, constructing his mastery over Ibsen’s life story rhetorically through the figure of the biographer–narrator, Ferguson undermines the authority of the biographer by underscoring, through the dramatic action, how easily crucial information about Ibsen is both concealed from and overlooked by the biographer–character.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".