Crossing the medicine line : the cowboy in Canadian prairie fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following Jane Tompkins' proposal in West of Everything that the cowboy generates his sense of self by opposing eastern centres as well as migrating across prairie landscape, and Dick Harrison's suggestion in Unnamed Country that Canadian prairie writing has developed no such figure, I choose to examine the impact of the (predominantly) American cowboy on Canadian prairie fiction. The conflicting dynamics of Harold Innis' Laurentian Thesis, which states that Canadian culture and identity were imported from the east, and Frederick Turner's Frontier Thesis, arguing that American identity is generated on the new frontier, provide means to interrogate the ways in which the cowboy represents and reveals different aspects of Canadian identity than can be found through the comparable law-making figure of the Mountie. The cowboy opposes the Laurentian Thesis, but, I argue, does not simply translate the Frontier Thesis to Canada. I track the ways the cowboy inflects Canadian prairie life - through the lenses of gender, of national selfhood, and of First Nations identity - by examining the writing of Sinclair Ross, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Thomas King.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".