Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the anomalous status of Stratford, Ontario, as the city with the highest percentage of arts-related employment per capita in Canada and as the home of North America’s largest classical theatre, the Stratford Festival (SF). The authors assert that this small city’s diverse cultural achievements are not accidents of history, as they are typically portrayed in theatre and cultural criticism, but rather effects of a civic tradition that connects citizenship to cultural infrastructure in the interest of developing an amenity-rich city. To illustrate this point, the authors review the literature on cultural clusters as it pertains to small cities, show how Stratford differs from the statistical norms, then demonstrate how Stratford’s history of financial, political and social investment in cultural infrastructure undergirded the founding of the SF in 1953. This infrastructure, which dates back to the 1850s, is largely overlooked in academic criticism on the SF because critics depend on founder Tom Patterson’s portrait of the SF in First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (1987, reissued 1999) as the origin, not the outgrowth, of Stratford’s cultural economy. In contrast to Patterson’s argument, which gets reiterated in academic and popular publications about Stratford, this article maintains that Stratford’s thriving cultural economy is not the product of a single institution or individual genius, but rather the outgrowth of an interconnected ecology of cultural agents, materials, influences, traditions and modes of communication.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".