Crossings: An Interview with Rebecca Comay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following Interview with Rebecca Comay (RC) took place on 28 October 2016 In Winnipeg. In addition to Mosaic Editor Dawne McCance (DM), two of the journal's graduate student interns, Katelyn Dykstra (KD) and David Hutten (DH), participated in the interview. Mosaic is pleased to publish the interview here. DM So here we are at the Fort Garry Hotel in Winnipeg on October 28th welcoming Rebecca Comay after her wonderful public lecture last night. Let's begin, Rebecca, by introducing you briefly to Mosaic readers, some of whom may not know of you and your work. Might you tell us where you studied and how you came to locate yourself at the University of Toronto between comparative literature and philosophy? RC Well, I had a stint at pretty hardcore philology--about as far away from philosophy I could get. My first degree was in Classics and Philosophy. While studying Greek, I became obsessed with learning other ancient languages and moved over into Hebrew and Egyptian and other Near Eastern languages. I flipped around for a while between very abstruse German philosophy and a lot of very dead languages--really, I am talking about staring at a lot of scratches [laughs]. I was quite restless. I was not a very focused student. I had done an MA in Philosophy, switched tracks and went off to Yale to start a PhD in Egyptology. I found myself falling down this rabbit hole of dead languages. I was studying Egyptian, Akkadian, and Sumerian--the languages of Mesopotamia (now Iraq, Iran)--Hebrew, Coptic, things like that. It was completely absorbing and it definitely fed a certain obsessional streak, but ultimately--I don't know, I think I probably didn't have the patience or stamina. It was a funny time and place to be doing that kind of thing: there I was living in New Haven during the glory days of Yale criticism, studying dead languages. De Man was giving his seminar on Shelley's Triumph of Life, Derrida was giving lectures on Blanchot. I was holed up in the Yale Babylonian Collection in Sterling Library. Somehow I got wind of this thing happening down the road, and found myself wandering off to these extraordinary seminars. It was more or less an accident that I ended up there--I think I had noticed a poster--but I was immediately hooked. I ended up wending my way back to philosophy. I wrote my PhD thesis on Heidegger's Zur Seinsfrage--that's the essay where Heidegger famously crosses out the word Being (the palimpsest produced by this typographical gesture was emblematic, for Derrida, of the operation of sous rature.) I went to live in Paris for a while and attended Derrida's seminar, as well as Deleuze's and Kristeva's classes. It was a pretty invigorating time. Derrida was extraordinarily generous to me, as he was to everyone. He gave me some great advice that I managed to completely ignore: he basically told me I should stop doing philosophy and get myself back to Assyriology ... oh well. The Philosophy department in Toronto has always been my home department, but several years ago I shifted part of my teaching over into Comparative Literature, partly out of intellectual restlessness; my own work has been taking me increasingly outside philosophy in any case. DM You work between the two units? RC I also teach in an undergraduate interdisciplinary program called Literature and Critical Theory, and I'm affiliated with German and Jewish Studies. So yes, I move around some. DM Please tell us about the European Graduate School. RC It's a really fascinating intellectual experiment. It's very different than a regular university, even though it has been formally accredited to grant degrees and so on (I think some people may be a little ambivalent about this semblance of normalization). Because of the small size, the intellectual focus, and the concentrated framework, everything is super intense. The students do all their coursework for the year in a compressed three-week session, everyone is living under one roof, living and breathing philosophy from morning to night--a cross between the Magic Mountain and high-altitude fitness training. …
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
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".