A Book Lover’s Journey: Literary Archaeology and Bibliophilia in Tim Bowling’s In the Suicide’s Library
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A native of the Canadian West Coast, Tim Bowling is widely acclaimed as one of the best living Canadian authors. A Book Lover’s Journey (2010) explores how a single object —a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s Ideas of Order that he finds in a university library— can render the past visible and tangible in its pure materiality. On the front flyleaf of Stevens’s book, Bowling finds the elegant handwritten name of its previous owner, Weldon Kees, an obscure American poet who apparently took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Finding this signed copy of Stevens’s masterpiece is just the beginning of Bowling’s lyrical meditation on books as art objects, on suicide, the relationships between fathers and daughters, the history of printing and bibliophilia, while pursuing an archaeology of the American literary past with an astounding level of artistry and lyrical intensity.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".