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Record W2914882583 · doi:10.1017/9781787442351.015

The Postcolonial Writer & the Existential Ordeal

2017· book-chapter· en· W2914882583 on OpenAlexaff
Nduka Otiono

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPostcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTrial by ordealExistentialismPhilosophyLiteratureArtTheologyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Day and night my toils redouble, Never nearer to their goals; Night and day I feel the trouble Of the wanderer in my soul. (William Wordsworth, ‘Song for the Wandering Jew’:146) It was threedays to my departure to Cambridge for a much-anticipatedprofessional development opportunity, but offices, shops andairports were closed. The usually bustling network of roadsthat run like the veins of a leaf through the city of Lagos,Nigeria's commercial capital, were desolate. And every tickof the clock increased my apprehension over a careeradvancement opportunity that was swinging on the pendulum ofuncertainty. And so, early on that first Monday of July2003, I called Patricia, the officer in charge of thearrangements at the British Council, my sponsor. She was asoft-spoken, dimpled, and amiable lady who walked sorhythmically one would think she was waltzing to some ghostmusic in her head. ‘Hey, Nduka’,she responded on the other end, as if she had been rousedfrom a reverie. ‘I've been trying to get hold of the travelagents on the phone without luck. I hate to believe that theproprietress has switched off her phone on a day like this.Other workers of the travel agency I tried are alsounavailable.’ ‘So what do wedo?’ I asked. ‘I'm not aboutgiving up, Nduka’, Patricia assured me. ‘I'll keep tryinguntil I get through. But then, even if I succeed, how wouldyou handle transportation from the mainland where you liveand pick up the ticket on the Island? I hear the roads arebarricaded and, besides, I understand the airport isdead.’ ‘Just leavethat to me. Let's get the travel documents first. Youhaven't forgotten that as a journalist I am permitted tocover the strike?’ Patricia's loudchuckle on the phone forced a smile out of me – a relievingact at a time when laughing seemed like a luxurious exerciseunless, of course, you were a Nigerian, curiously describedby a UK-based research group, as ‘the happiest people onearth’. Indeed, Lagos could force one into believing thatclaim. Despite prevalent privations, the streets of Lagoswere a theatre of tragicomedies and melodramas. In thatinstant, a scene I had witnessed flitted through my mindlike a dreadful dream.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.023
Threshold uncertainty score0.078

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.008
Scholarly communication0.0080.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0230.006

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 head0.051
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.197 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2017
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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