Borderland Identities in Niagara: Craig Davidson’s <i>Cataract City</i> (2013)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This present article explores how border identities are narrated in Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (2013), a Canadian novel about friendship between two young men, set in Niagara Falls, Ontario and their involvement with a smuggler on the Tuscarora Reservation near Niagara Falls, New York. Drawing on research on the complex and contradictory nature of border identities in Canada and elsewhere, it examines how the novel’s Niagara protagonists negotiate identity and relationships in the region. My reading shows how the text’s protagonists engage in cross-border activities without forming ties on the other side of the border. The Native characters demonstrate a different rapport with the 49th parallel, positioning themselves outside of both the American and Canadian nation-state yet without forming pan-tribal alliances. In the end, Davidson’s fictional representation of the Canada–U.S. border region in Cataract City confirms and complements border studies research that finds increasing obstacles to cross-border cooperation and an absence of shared identity constructs along the Canada–U.S. border.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".