Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the relationship of Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and seminal media theorist Marshall McLuhan through an examination of their correspondence, which has never been studied as a discrete entity. The two men were at the forefront of discussions about critical issues of globalization, especially the political uses of media, at a time when globalization was not yet a recognized keyword in the literature. All this is reflected in the correspondence. There were almost 100 items, housed at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in Ottawa, many of which have appeared in pieces in books written about either man; many of McLuhan’s are in a 1987 collection of his letters, published by Oxford University Press. Mainly, I searched through primary and secondary documents, though I did contact several of McLuhan’s children, spoke with a few people who knew either or both men and paid a visit to LAC. The letters form the second chapter of this dissertation, an intersection between Part I, which introduces them and my interest in them, and Part III, in which I take readers through the correspondence. Part IV is primarily a description of the personal journey through issues of globalization, multiculturalism and borders that ties it all together. The relationship between these two intellects was warm and nuanced. Trudeau “spoke of McLuhan with great reverence” and, for McLuhan, Trudeau was “an image of the age, a phenomenon of media, a rare combination of training, practice, intuition, vision; a figure of undoubted fascination, a charismatic who manifested the Canadian dualities and ambiguities.” Both were experts at media manipulation and recognized that in the other. McLuhan was teaching the world about the global village at the same time as Trudeau was helping Canada find its place and meanings in it. Even a cursory glance at the news today shows how much their work is still relevant and needs to be built upon.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.536 | 0.347 |
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".