Toward an Environmental Imagination of Displacement in Contemporary Transnational American Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the foreword to the anthology Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1998) , renowned Ethiopian-born, Indian American author Abraham Verghese stages the very process of writing the foreword for the book in his readers’ hands. Verghese describes himself as he is working in his home office looking out the window and then comments: “This xeriscaped west Texas is now my world. It resembles in no way other lands and continents I have lived in. But physical geography is of no longer much importance to me (as long as it isn’t cold).” 1 Styling himself as a world citizen and as a postmodern world-traveler, Verghese repeats a truism that still seems to guide much of the writing, whether literary or critical, that concerns itself with issues of globalization and transnationalism, that is, the notion that we are living in a time of deterritorialization in which technological advances and socio-political changes related to increased mobility of goods, peoples, and ideas have effectively detached culture from place. 2 According to Verghese, such a condition of placelessness is a lived reality that shapes the works of transnational American authors in crucial ways, a fact he illustrates with a particularly striking spatial image. Describing the socio-cultural context in which he and others like him produce their literary and critical works, he speaks of “a third South Asia, a continent that hovers in space over North America, supported by massive pillars in New York/New Jersey, Toronto [... and] columns thrusting up from every other city.” 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".