In Review: Somewhere Else, The East End Plays, Part 2, Suburban Motel (revised edition), Essays on George F. Walker: Playing with Anxiety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historiographically, 1999 was a big year for George F. Walker: Talonbooks brought out three volumes of collected plays (a total of thirteen more-or-less individual works), and Blizzard published the first full-length book of criticism devoted entirely to Walker and his plays. By the time the new millennium became the most over-staged non-event in history, students and teachers of Canadian drama did not have to look too far to find a playwright with a significant historical past and presence available for inclusion in their courses. This at a time when our political-economic climate does not particularly favour indigenous publishing of Canadian literature, with government funding policies that clearly prefer to put their trust in the cultural benevolence of the huge American publishers. The odds are stacked even further against dramatic literature: as Maria Campbell argues in the introduction to The Book of Jessica, “Who reads plays, anyway?” and certainly plays and criticism tend to have a considerably lower shelf and reader appeal than does literature. Even given the reasonably strong (if not solid) positions that Blizzard and Talon have fought to establish within Canadian (dramatic) publishing, this focus on one playwright is somewhat remarkable. To paraphrase from Walker’s own dialogue, if “there is definitely hardly any justice in the world,” is there any discernible reason why Walker is among the “haves,” rather than the “have-nots,” when it comes to published texts? Do the plays of George F. Walker, indeed, have a “special quality that can be marketed,” or are these four volumes just evidence of Walker’s own good luck?
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.016 |
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".