MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2830919949 · doi:10.1093/notesj/gjy080

H. G. Wells and Horace

2018· article· ceb· W2830919949 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueNotes and Queries · 2018
Typearticle
Languageceb
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicShakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLiteratureBeautyCharacter (mathematics)ArtReading (process)ClassicsHistoryArt historyPhilosophyLinguisticsAesthetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

THE small library to which the narrator Prendick has access in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) consists of ‘an array of old books, chiefly, I found, surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics (languages I cannot read with any comfort), on a shelf near the hammock’.1 These are Moreau’s books, and although Prendick is disinclined to engage with the classics, he is soon found reading ‘a small crib of Horace’2 to distract himself from the agonized crying of the puma being vivisected in the adjoining room. The choice of Horace is not accidental, and this note will suggest a new reason for Wells’s selection of this particular detail. Wells did not have much familiarity with ancient sources.3 Other contemporary authors demonstrate that ‘Horace was the best-remembered classical author in nineteenth-century England’,4 and that references to the works of the Latin poet are predominantly to the four books of lyric Odes.5 Other works, including the Ars Poetica, ‘were often largely ignored’.6 This is commensurate with what is seen in the opening chapter of Wells’s Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), where the title character struggles to understand Odes 1.19 at school. The arduous progress of the young translator contrasts comically with the ardour of the Roman poet extolling Venus, ‘the untameable mother of desires’ (Wells’s translation of Mater saeva cupidinum),7 and describing how ‘the beauty of Glycera inflamed me’ (urit me Glycerae nitor, left untranslated by Wells).8 Later, Lewisham is reading Odes 1.14, where Horace addresses the ship of state, cautioning it to ‘Beware, lest you become the plaything of the winds’ (tu, nisi ventis | debes ludibrium, cave, also left untranslated). For the character, Horace offers ‘the route by which he too hopes to achieve gentlemanly respectability’.9 Lewisham is eventually diverted from his academic course, and himself becomes a plaything for the winds, but that outcome is not known when the reader is told that the passage ‘was the appropriate matter of Mr Lewisham’s thoughts, and he was mechanically trying to keep the book open in three places at once, at the text, the notes, and the literal translation’.10

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.967
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.027
GPT teacher head0.246
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it