15. What are we reading? —an investigation of the genres of texts being studied by the Queen’s Undergraduate English Department"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2006 report by Dr. Frances Henry entitled “Understanding the Experiences of Visible Minority and Aboriginal Faculty Members at Queen’s University” stated that “Queen's, like most other North American universities, is still struggling to overcome deeply entrenched cultural beliefs, values, norms and structures that preserve the continued dominance of Whiteness and maleness” (Henry, 157), and called on all departments to diversify their curriculum. Today, the Queen’s Academic plan expressly states that “Adequate representation of Indigenous issues in curricula across campus needs to be a major objective“(29). With the addition of Mohawk and Inuktitut classes and the Indigenous studies program, Queen’s as a whole is taking action to meet this objective. As a student of English myself, I was interested in examining the state of the curriculum in Undergraduate English Department. In particular, I was interested in exploring whether texts by North American Indigenous authors are being included in the curriculum, and what space is created for these texts within the English Department. My researchexamined the 1,289 texts ordered for Undergraduate English classes between the Fall Semester of 2009 and the Winter Semester of 2013. These texts represent up an institution-specific canon, a snapshot of what the Queen’s English Department—intentionally or unintentionally—have construed as important to the field. My goal was to determine whether the “Eurocentric curriculum” (146) that the Henry report underscored persists within the English department, or whether academic spaces are being created that include Indigenous Literature.
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.
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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".