The music of dead sisters: a feminist comparison of two folktales about singing bones and reeds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article compares and contrasts two folktales. The first is the traditional ballad, ‘The twa sisters’, collected by Francis J. Child in the 19 th century. The Canadian folksinger Loreena McKennitt compiled a variant of this, called ‘The bonny swans’. Many of these ballads feature a musical instrument composed of the bones of the slain sister, which sings the name of her killer, who is her heartless sister. The second folktale is ‘The singing reed’, a story collected in Namibia by Sigrid Schmidt. This tale recounts the story of a girl who dies due to the cruelty of her peers. Some of her blood splashes onto a reed, which sings to her brothers. No claim is made for any direct connection between the two tales; however, transcultural traffic entailed the exchange of various stories, both in written and oral form. Using a feminist perspective, the effects created in both of the folktales are analysed, including the representations of family life, the use of oral features and music, the references to magic talismans and the yearning to transcend the boundaries of death. The consonances and pertinent differences between the two narratives, highlighting their significance socially, politically and spiritually, are explored.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".