'Mothers and Daughters Writing' Review of Sheila Munro's Lives of Mothers and Daughters and Carol Shields’ Jane Austen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shakespeare used the metaphor of a screw to describe the workings of human courage. Turn that screw once, and you have a sense of what might be involved in undertaking to write a biography about someone you respect - a literary foremother, for example. Turn it once more, and you get closer to what is involved in undertaking to write a biography of your own mother - even if you don't screw your courage to the sticking place, even if you decide to call it by another name (like 'memoir'), even if you tell the world that writing it was first her idea not yours (as does Sheila Munro). Despite summoning the necessary courage, though, both authors betray a sense of cautiousness: first by navigating through a sequence of precautionary steps; then by resisting the very conclusions they reach. These moments of resistance - brief, disguised as offhand comments - are what make these books so compelling; for they occur when the screw of courage is tightened to its very limits.
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 | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".