Incorrigible While Incarcerated: Topic Modeling Mainstream Canadian News Depictions of Ashley Smith
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ashley Smith, who is typically presented in the media as mentally ill, was nineteen years old when she died from self-strangulation in an Ontario women's prison on October 19 th , 2007. In this thesis, I explored how Ashley Smith's actions and death were portrayed in four mainstream Canadian newspapers (Globe and Mail, Telegraph-Journal, Toronto Star and National Post). My aim in this thesis is to critically analyze patterns of stereotypes of mental illness present in these news articles and connect these patterns to labeling theories. To accomplish this goal, I used a mixed methods approach that combined computerized topic modeling with critical reading. Topic modeling revealed three variables that affected topic weight: the timing of the news coverage, newspaper political affiliation and circulation/location. These three variables also impacted how these newspapers depicted Ashley Smith as mentally ill, through their use of generic and/or negative terminology, medicalization and vulnerability stereotypes.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it