“That city, that self”: Tracing a Historical Trajectory of the City Writer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".