Bibliographic record
Abstract
In my book on The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), I devoted considerable space to the work of Muriel Spark, but I have long wanted to write something more substantial on her novels, both because she seems to me the most important Scottish novelist of the second half of the twentieth century -despite the many demurrals about whether she can really be counted as Scottish -and because her reputation as a novelist is often undermined by a sense that she is clever and witty rather than profound, and that, if she is the most important British novelist of the period, that is, at least in part, because the British novel is itself so insignifi cant.I originally set out to write a book on Spark as a Scottish novelist in the tradition of Stevenson and Barrie, and elements of that will be found occasionally in this book, but my interest in Spark here is in Spark as a theologically and philosophically informed writer, profoundly infl uenced by the works of Kierkegaard -as Chapter 1 suggests, the plots of her early novels refl ect aspects of Kierkegaard's life and writings -and also with the consequences of the post-war existentialisms for which Kierkegaard had been a major inspiration.Some of the original research for this book was done while I was Director of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and I am grateful to the AHRC for the support they then provided, and to the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.581 | 0.366 |
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".