Nation-Building and Myth-Making in Contemporary Writing About the Canadian Experience of the First World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pierre Berton’s 1985 account of the Canadian memory of Vimy Ridge begins: “It is probably that with the exception of the Krakatoa explosion of 1883, in all of history no human ears had ever been assaulted by the intensity of sound produced by the artillery barrage that launched the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917” (Berton 14). Thirty-three years later, Tim Cook’s begins: “The Vimy Memorial, with its white, almost luminescent stone, stands on the ramparts of a ridge in northeastern France, a site of mass killing and myth-making” (Cook 1). These two works considering Vimy Ridge, its memorial, and its legacy begin from two very different perspectives: Berton is grounded in the morning of the battle, which carries the significance of the most powerful volcanic eruption in known history; Cook begins his study immediately before the iconic memorial with an awareness of the century-long distance between his writing and the battle itself, and of all the weighty remembrance that distance has accrued for the Canadian memorialization of the event. Considered side-by-side, these two Vimys highlight the changes (and lack thereof) in popular and historical commemoration of the First World War. This project investigates the memorialization of the First World War and Vimy Ridge in through investigative readings of Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers, and both Berton and Cook’s Vimys in the hopes of understanding possible nationalist drives creating and recreating the nation-building myth of the First World War in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.060 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".