Bibliographic record
Abstract
“No place like home” My opening phrase, taken from The Blind Assassin is, in its turn, a well-known quotation from The Wizard of Oz . In Atwood's novel, it relates to an episode from the Chase sisters' adolescence, where it is irreverent, odd, loony Laura who rewrites the sentence she heard many times from Reenie, the family housekeeper, whose language floods over with common sense, folk sayings, and popular wisdom. Laura's rewriting of “There's no place like home” - a stupid statement in her opinion - goes like this: “She wrote it out as an equation. No place = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist .” The Blind Assassin destabilizes received notions of home, with their conventional meanings of comfort, security, and custom. The Chase family estate - Avilion - acts as a refuge for the whole family; it functions as a bastion to keep the world outside at bay. In this novel, however, homes are also represented as provisional; they are unstable entities, like the patrimony of the Chase family. The sense of security, stability, and reassurance that Avilion has provided for Iris and Laura crumbles at one point in the narrative. Such a precarious figuration of home parallels the representation of nation and issues of national identity. Contemporary Canada, seen through Iris's eyes, appears, much to her astonishment, an odd assortment, a multicultural mosaic of ethnicities and languages with an elusive identity, which for people of Iris's generation and background comes very much as a surprise. Crucial also in this novel is the presence of an outsider, here embodied by Laura.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".