Bibliographic record
Abstract
During a conversation in Siena with Mary Melfi, we followed her journey to the land her mother had left behind in search of a New Life across the Ocean.Our springboard was the kitchen table where mother and daughter would sit, retrieving their immigrant story.Listening to Mary Melfi's reading of her 'conversations' with her mother, as recorded in her memoir Italy Revisited, we observed how the 'food' prepared at that table in a Montreal kitchen nourished a complex intricacy of the real and the imagined; we had a sense of the contradictory, entangled feelings with which memory paves the return to the past while promoting the advance to self-discovery.In her mother's kitchen, Mary Melfi was doing what Joe Fiorito did (or was imagined to have done) at his father's deathbed.In the memoir The Closer We Are to Dying, Joe Fiorito recalls how he "asked [his father] for the old stories" because he wanted to know who he was, who his father was, and where his family had come from."These old stories," he claimed, "were the foundation on which the family had been built, they were the very material of which each of us [...] were made" (70).Similarly, in her mother's kitchen, Melfi was looking for her roots and constructing her identity-a common game or quest for the immigrant psyche, troubled as it so often is by the discomfort of hyphenation, of being neither this nor that, and complicated by conflicting feelings of self-indulgence, excruciating angst or ineradicable shame.This discomforting experience of hyphenation is recounted by Fiorito in his perhaps fictional memoir: "My playground pals were English and Irish and Slovack, all Canadian kids; I was one of the gang, but I wasn't [...].I was not like my cousins, and not like the neighbourhood tough, neither was I like the other Canadian kids" (280).A similar malaise is described in the biotext Diamond Grill by Chinese-Canadian Fred Wah, who recollects his school-day interactions with kids of many other racial identities-Italian, Doukhobor, or British: "There's a whole bunch of us who've grown up as resident aliens, living in the hyphen."For many
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".