Ending up with a Question Mark: An Interview with David Albahari
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past four decades, Jewish Serbian-Canadian author David Albahari has produced a body of work that persistently questions matters of identity, language, and history. Until moving to Calgary in 1994, he spent most of his youth and adult life in Zemun and Belgrade. A prolific writer and translator (he has translated Beckett, Pynchon, Bellow, and others), Albahari also served as chair of the Federation of Jewish Communes in Yugoslavia in 1991, working closely on the evacuation of the Jewish population in Sarajevo. His 1996 novel Mamac (Eng. Bait, 2001), which partially draws on his experience of war-torn Yugoslavia, was awarded the NIN Award in 1997 and the Balkanica Award in 1998. For its translation, together with his translators Miryana and Klaus Wittman, Albahari received the Brücke Berlin Literature and Translation Prize. In 2003 Götz and Meyer, the English translation of Gec i Majer (1998), won the ALTA National Translation Award. Other works available in English include the novels Tsing (1997), Snow Man (2005), Leeches (2011), and the shortstory collection Words Are Something Else (1996). Albahari's works have been translated into more than sixteen languages, and in 2012 he received the Vilenica Prize, following in the footsteps of such writers as Milan Kundera and Claudio Magris. We caught up with Albahari in a quiet coffee shop in Zemun.
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 | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".