Ryga, Miss Donohue, and Me: Forty Years of <i>The Ecstasy of Rita</i> Joe in the University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the seminal role that George Ryga’s 1967 classic, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, played in igniting the modern Canadian theatre has often been acknowledged, the extent to which its success also constituted a concentrated attack on what Ryga termed the “complacent educator” in 1977, and helped revolutionize the publication and teaching of Canadian plays at the post-secondary level, may have been less well acknowledged. This article, which documents Moira Day’s own forty-year odyssey with the play in the (largely) prairie university classroom as both a student and an instructor, investigates the play’s initial impact on scholarship, publication, curriculum at the post-secondary leve , and some of its ramifications on school and university production and actor training over the 1970 and 1980s. It also deals with the challenges of continuing to teach and interpret the play from the 1990s onward, as new practices and theories have continued to alter its meaning, and considers why this odd, iconoclastic text, despite its flaws, continues to fascinate us fifty years after its initial production.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".