Staying Afloat in the Typing Pool: P.K. Page, Poetry, and the Modern Office
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first few years of the 1940s, poet P.K. Page was employed as a filing clerk for Allied War Supplies, a Montreal-based war firm tasked with producing and distributing materials needed for Canada’s war effort. During this time, Page joined the editorial committee of Preview, a socialist poetry magazine to which she contributed a number of poems about office work, workers, and managerial culture. This essay reads that remarkable set of poems through a double lens: it first explores their documentary and diagnostic value as an insider’s view of the office during what Graham S. Lowe calls the “administrative revolution”; it then shows how the socialist “work” of these poems is constrained by an aesthetic philosophy that defines the poet and poetry in opposition to labourers and labour—a stance that introduces a number of contradictions that account for the poems’ strangely ambivalent and patronizing tone.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".