Bending Before the Storm: Continentalism in the Visual Culture of Canadian Magazines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay analyzes the shared visual culture of the United States and Canada in Anglophone magazine illustration 1900–1950, in the context of cultural nationalist rhetoric and continentalism. Focusing on “pretty girl” illustration, it demonstrates how the picturing of women (stemming from patriotic “American Girl” imagery in the US) in Canada signified “the Canadian Girl” in contrast to the well-known Canadian wilderness trope. Although cultural nationalist polemics characterized such imagery as an “invader,” evidence indicates Canadians sought and produced this material eagerly and gave it special Canadian attributes. Both a “British” identity and a modern American identity can be discerned in publishing and authorship contexts, even when the Canadian artwork’s physical appearance is indistinguishable from American counterparts. Visually similar illustration production in the US and Canada suggests that “American” influence should be considered a legitimate facet of Canadian cultural identity, just as British or French influence is, but Canadian art history has neglected it, something this study is meant to rectify. The essay suggests that the flexibility of tropes to be adapted to varying circumstances—to bend—has allowed Canadians to negotiate national identity in degrees of hybridity, reflecting the experience of living in a print culture that transcends the border. Such continentalism has helped to preserve Canada’s autonomy by providing a non-threatening similarity to the United States; by helping Canadians stay culturally literate in Americana, which enables their potential intervention into it; and by providing economic and social advantages to those who partake in its production or reception.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".