"A Sceptic in a Credulous World": re-evaluating the work of Stewart Parker on the twentieth anniversary of his death
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper aims to survey and re-evaluate the work of Northern Irish writer, Stewart Parker, following the twentieth anniversary of his death in November 2008. The paper takes into account work collected and published in 2008 that had been previously available only in archives. The focus is upon the alternative images of Northern Ireland that are to be found in Parker's dramatic writings. These alternative versions might be informally divided into two categories: the work that deals with specific historical events or moments, and the work which more generally addresses conditions of existence in and attitudes to Northern Ireland. In both what is of most consequence is personal experience and individual will to transcend or survive the constraints of circumstance. It is this quality which has led commentators to remark upon the humanistic and humane tenor of Parker's work and remains as captivating today as it did more than twenty years ago. The plays discussed include Spokesong, Northern Star, Pentecost, The Iceberg, I'm a Dreamer Montreal, Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain and Lost Belongings.
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 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 | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".