Islands erased by snow and ice: approaching the spatial philosophy of cold water island imaginaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representations of islands in Western fiction typically revolve around tropical islands. Critical discourse tends to reproduce this tendency and rarely addresses the specific spatial poetics of cold-water island fictions. This paper discusses three texts that poetically deploy the geographical inventory of northern snow- and icescapes to challenge essentialist assumptions about islands: D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The man who loved islands”, Georgina Harding’s novel The solitude of Thomas Cave, and Michel Serres’s treatise Le passage du Nord-Ouest. It is argued that these texts reflect on the importance of the horizontal and vertical components of material and textual topographies for the conception and experience of islands. In all three, the physical transformation of the islandscapes by snow and ice serves to put the island concept itself into question. Serres’s philosophical text geopoetically portrays the Arctic archipelago of the Northwest Passage to explore the reciprocal relations between language and the material world. In Lawrence and Harding, the snow-covered islands cease to function as economically productive spaces and turn into complex spatial figures offering a philosophical meditation on islandness as a contradictory and multifaceted condition.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".