‘The Leader of the Virgin Choirs of Erin’: St Brigid’s Missionary College, 1883–1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first years of the twentieth century, on the feast day of St Francis, a ‘grand’ stuffed beaver arrived at the Convent of Mercy in Callan, Co. Kilkenny. It was not a particularly unusual gift: like many others, the sender had been an ‘aspirant’ at St Brigid’s Missionary College, which was attached to the convent. Now a Sister of Mercy in St John’s, Newfoundland, no doubt she wanted to show off her new home to her old school. So many such gifts had arrived, the mother superior told her uncle, Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran of Sydney, Australia, that they would have to ‘enlarge the museum cases’. 1 ‘Far and wide’, another former aspirant wrote in 1898, ‘are St. Brigid’s children scattered in widely different latitudes, in far-away settlements at the goldfields, across the prairies, and under Indian suns, members of more than a dozen Religious Orders, each with its own special work of corporal or spiritual Mercy’. 2 This was not an exaggeration: although not all persevered in their vocation, and not all who did left Ireland, between 1883 and its closure in the mid-1950s, some 2000 women entered St Brigid’s Missionary College with a view to service in Ireland’s spiritual empire. 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.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.005 |
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".