Canadian Young People and their Reading Worlds: Conditions of Literature in Contemporary Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt of this article: Consider these observations on the current literary scene for young Canadians: • Writers, illustrators and publishers produce wonderful books for children and adolescents. • Contemporary young people achieve basic literacy and also develop sophisticated literary understanding through their exposure to clever, appealing, and subtle literature created just for them. • The output of Canadian children’s publishing is extensive and varied when compared to what was available for children of a couple of generations ago. • Those who work with children and their literature have a job that is both significant and special. I actually believe all the statements in this list. But this rosy account of affairs is also very partial. As Peter Hunt puts it, “children’s books may look sweet and innocent, but they cannot be—and nor can their critics” (154). The world of children’s literature cannot be sealed off in a bubble; it exists in a context of real children and their institutions (family, school, library—which are not emotionally, pedagogically, or financially equal), of publishers and booksellers driven by commercial considerations, of rapid cultural and technological change that affects children as much as or more than older citizens. I am an academic working in the area of literature for young people. Although I am very interested in the literary qualities of texts for youth, I also firmly believe that those who work with children’s literature should make a point of reading the business news. Market conditions, institutional pressures, technological developments—all impinge on how literature is created, distributed, and presented to young people.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.081 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".