Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Dickinson's exploration of the treatment of Methodists in British fiction since the end of the nineteenth century focuses on nine authors and ten novels. One novel was written by a Methodist, Joseph Hocking; some of the others came from the pens of authors with Methodist antecedents or sympathies (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Howard Spring, and George Eliot); the rest emanated from people with little first hand knowledge of Methodism, or, in the case of Arnold Bennett, a deep animosity toward it. It is not clear whether the chosen authors and titles are to be regarded as representative or typical, or as especially significant, but the list is evidently not comprehensive, either of Methodist writers or of the appearance of Methodists in fiction, and it would be helpful to know the rationale for the selection. The chapters are partly chronological and partly thematic, and they include summaries of the plots under consideration, as well as some reflection and analysis. Overall, Dr Dickinson finds that there is a lot of nostalgia for an imagined Methodism of yesteryear in the novels, and he suggests that contemporary authors may find Methodism unpromising territory for fiction because it lacks the sort of ecclesiastical hierarchy, dogmatic belief system, and social breadth which feed plots. Surely there is plenty of scope here for further investigation!
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".