An Empty Grave: Grief and Mourning on the Canadian Home Front in the First World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The onset of the First World War forced significant changes to rituals surrounding death and to beliefs surrounding what constituted a “good death.” This thesis examines those changes brought to mourning rituals in Canada as a result of the massive number of deaths that occurred throughout the First World War, while arguing that the battlefield nature of death, the absence of the body of the deceased, and the inability of loved ones to access the graves of the fallen was at the center of these changes. The inability of Canadians to conduct traditional rituals which were dependent on the presence of the dead body of their loved ones, meant that it was difficult to accept the reality of those deaths. The absence of the body of the deceased, and the inability to perform rituals surrounding it, also meant that many bereaved Canadians struggled to process their losses and attain closure. The First World War changed the nature of consolation because without the bodies of the deceased, people did not gather to comfort the bereaved, instead providing their condolences through letters which often offered comfort by revering the dead and sharing precious memories. Canadians found new ways to process their grief and console the bereaved by creating myths which involved employing the language of sacrifice while performing various acts of commemoration, all of which has crafted the way the war, and those who fought and fell, have been remembered since.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".