Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short story was written in the context of an upper level undergraduate course run by Dr. Dimitris Krallis this fall at Simon Fraser University—Fantasy in Byzantium—which examined the ways in which Byzantine sources have influenced and been reinterpreted in modern fiction. During the course I was struck by the wonderfully vituperative style of John Tzetzes, a twelfth-century polymath infamous even in today’s scholarship for his endless quarrels over minor grammatical points and his near-eternal grudges. Reading Tzetzes, it is hard not to wonder how such a sharp-tongued character would have navigated a society in which literary and political circles were so close knit. Thus, this story began in part as an attempt to play with the idea of how a person like Tzetzes might have tried to walk back a statement that went too far, or was too direct to be veiled by literary references or allegory. The challenge for a Byzantine writer was in part finding a way to incorporate the old into the new in a way that both added depth and bolstered the credibility of the author, and in keeping with this, I set out to try to create my own imitation primary source out of quotes from other Byzantine writers, complete with the explanatory notes we sometimes see requested in Byzantine letters or marginalia. Tzetzes’ personality, and some of his nastiest letters, also reminded me instantly of the kinds of characters that show up in the works of Vladimir Nabokov—the eloquently miserable, self-obsessed narrators of works like The Vane Sisters and Pale Fire—and so I have drawn on Nabokov’s characterizations and on the structure of Pale Fire in an effort to combine the old and the new. The text that follows, connects elements of the past and present, history and fiction, tragedy and satire, which I hope will invite further reflection
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.010 |
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".