Envisioning basketball: a socio-biographical investigation of Ruth Wilson - one of western Canada's sporting pioneers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of women’s basketball in Canada has been influenced by key individuals who have challenged systemic barriers and social mores demanding appropriate female behaviors and activities. In this study I examine the sporting contributions of Vancouverite Ruth Wilson, whose involvements in the sport of women’s basketball from the mid 1930s through the 1960s was significant. Though several studies have highlighted the importance of women’s basketball in a North American context (Hall, 2002; Cahn, 1994; Kidd, 1996; Hult and Trekell, 1991), to date there has not been a significant examination of the development of basketball for women and its early advocates in western Canada. Celebrating heroines of sport is not a straightforward matter. The concept of the heroic, as Hargreaves points out, must be examined through an analysis of the struggles and achievements of many women whose stories have been excluded or forgotten from previous accounts of women’s sports and female heroism (Hargreaves, 2000). Thus my account of Ruth Wilson’s contributions provides a unique case study of one womans persistent and wide ranging efforts to change the ways in which girls and women participated in a sport which brought them freedom to compete, professional opportunities and in some cases, national status. This study employs several methodological techniques. Data was collected through primary and secondary document analysis in conjunction with semi-structured open ended interviews. Ruth Wilson’s contributions have been highlighted through the narratives of female sportswomen whom she mentored, assisted, befriended and coached and who are still living today to provide their memories about her role in changing the landscape of women’s basketball in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".