'Byron and Identity' 33rd International Byron Conference 9-13 July 2007 Venice International University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I loved her from my boyhood; she to me Was as a fairy city of the heart, Rising like water-columns from the sea, Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart; And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare's art, Had stamp'd her image in me. (CHP, IV, 4) It seems fitting that this year's International Byron Conference, with its theme of 'Byron and Identity', was held in a city that was so central to Byron's own sense of self. That the image of Venice was stamped not just on the narrator of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage but in him suggests an intimate merging of geographical location and selfhood. And just as the works of Shakespeare and Radcliffe impressed Byron with a Romantic vision of a fairy city so, for readers of Byron, Venice will always be the city of Childe Harold, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. The centrality of Venice to Byron's life and poetry - in addition to the fact that the city played host to one of the most fondly remembered of all IBS conferences in 1986 - gave the 33rd International Byron Conference a particularly monumental feel. It certainly attracted a large number of delegates, drawing not only leading academics and researchers but also newly enthused students and readers of Byron from around the world. The opening plenary immediately challenged our conceptions of identity, with Jerome McGann appearing to look very much like Bernard Beatty. It turned out that Professor McGann's arrival was delayed, so we were treated to a brilliant and entertaining paper by Beatty (Liverpool) on the familial and 'abyssal' meanings of names in Byron's poetry. We then separated for some excellent parallel sessions, re-grouping for mid-morning and afternoon snacks that could only be described as molto delizioso. If the papers had not been so consistently outstanding, there would have a been a real danger of our lingering in the snack room all day, gazing at the view and munching on biscotti. The necessary parallel sessions meant that it was not possible to hear all the papers, but chats during the breaks suggested that the academic standard of this year's conference was very high. Stand-out papers included Tim Webb (Bristol) on Byron's use of Italian, Gavin Hopps (St Andrews) on Byron's ghostly 'shades of being', Andrew Stauffer (Boston) on forgery and the textual misappropriation of Byron's work, Tony Howe (Oxford) on heroic rhetoric and Tom Mole (McGill) on non-developmental narrative structures in Don Juan. We were also treated to a fascinating second plenary paper by Jane Stabler (St Andrews) on Byron's Victorian identities and the opposition between 'real' self and poetic self-expression. Perhaps the raciest session of the conference was on the theme of 'Byron and Venice'. Here David Laven (Manchester) began by suggesting that Byron knew very little about the political and social issues facing Venice at the time he was living there. Laven convincingly argued that the Venice Byron loved was an imagined, literary site which bore very little resemblance to the actual working city. Jack Wasserman (Byron Society of America) went on to give an entertaining discussion of homosexuality and the carnivalesque in Byron's Venice, while Peter Cochran finished with a paper on Pietro Buratti's jaw-dropping L'Elefanteide, a poetic account of the escape and subsequent death of a Venetian elephant, which Byron himself wrote of in a letter to Hobhouse. Cochran definitely wins the award for best prop of the conference, with his use of a bicycle horn to cover expletives that would have made even Byron blush. The San Servolo Special Session on Byron and Shelley was an especially interesting event, and another highlight of the conference. It began with Francesco Rognoni (Milan) suggesting that Julian and Maddalo has surprising connections to Rousseau's Confessions, as Shelley and Rousseau shared a similar distaste for the kind of life Byron led in Venice. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.241 | 0.051 |
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".