<scp>Robert Bringhurst</scp>, <i>A story as sharp as a knife: The classic Haida mythtellers and their world</i>. Vancouver & Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999. Pp. 527. Hb $45.00; <scp>Robert Bringhurst</scp>, <i>Nine visits to the mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas</i>. (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, vol. 2.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. 222. Hb $37.95; and <scp>Robert Bringhurst</scp>, <i>Being in being: The collected works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay</i>. (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, vol. 3.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Pp. 397. Hb. $35.00
Bibliographic record
Abstract
These three volumes invite a volume in return. They bring Haida to the fore of what is known of oral narrative in Native North America. One finds a dedicated philological sleuth, tracking down original texts and unpublished manuscripts (see A story as sharp as a knife, pp. 221–2; Nine visits to the mythworld, p. 17); a historian of anthropology, reconstructing and relating the story of a young fieldworker who is now largely forgotten (John R. Swanton); a pursuit of detail that enters into a past world, identifying in footnotes and photographs the places and foods and material culture of that world; and a creative writer reimagining Haida men, on islands crumbled by disease and occupation, re-creating in narratives a world their minds could still imagine. Not least, one finds someone for whom the arts are a normal part of life, and for whom the conception and misfortunes of a painting by Velasquez (44–49) can illuminate the relationship between myth time and historical time in Haida. Finally, the writing displays an ease, indeed a gift for words, that befits an established poet, and the books themselves are attractive, as befits a typographer versed in visual arts. (Bringhurst was invited to bring out a new edition, Chappell & Bringhurst 1999, of a standard book. The new edition indeed displays two pages [298–99] in line and verse of Victoria Howard's “Gitskux and his older brother” [Clackamas Chinook]; see Hymes 1983. His book of 1992 has been a bestseller.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.013 |
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".