Loss, Diaspora, Displacement, and Parentage in Alistair MacLeodʼs No Great Mischief
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a novel about family, history, clan bonds and the preservation of Scottish tradition and history by Scottish immigrants in Cape Breton, Canada. Spanning over two centuries, narrator Alexander MacDonald’s family history maps out the generational effects of the Scottish diaspora on the extended clan, clann Chalum Ruaidh, including loss of land, language, music, and clan members. Clann Calum Ruaidh becomes dispersed within Canada itself, although it is never spiritually divided as kinship bonds are repetitively enforced, and its members remain, as Lily Cho writes of diasporic communities, “connected by a sense of a homeland” (2007, p. 12). Yet while the novel is about familial relationships during a lifetime of cultural preservation in a new country, what ultimately haunts the text is significant loss of parentage. If the diasporic experience means to be “marked by loss”, as Cho suggests (2007, p. 19), then Alexander and the various members of clann Chalum Ruaidh are undoubtedly diasporic subjects. The novel is shaped by familial loss and the characters as products of the Scottish diaspora are challenged to preserve their Scottish traditions, language, lore and sense of the homeland in Canada in and amidst these tragedies. Throughout the text, the diasporic experience is manifested in the deaths of the parents of central characters such as Alexander, Catherine, Calum, the initial children of Calum Ruadh, and Grandfather MacDonald. While parentage is a means with which these characters connect to Scotland and Scottish tradition, the preservation process is hindered by the deaths of parents in clann Chalum Ruaidh. The mother and father figures in the clan function as the closest ties to the Scottish homeland generationally and genealogically, and as they disappear, these ties to homeland and history become obscured, and the children of the clan, displaced.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 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".