Listening to Linda Griffiths: Heeding to the Archives of an Emblematic Voice in Canadian Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Linda Griffiths, actor and playwright, was a charismatic and vital presence within Canadian theatre from the early 1970s, writing and performing until her untimely death in 2014. She worked in theatres across Canada all the while maintaining her dedication to her home, Theatre Passe Muraille, creating award-winning pieces that were also audience hits. This article presents and employs an archival methodology that the author calls listening to Linda. In the first part of this piece, the author makes key historiographical interventions in Canadian theatre history based on her recognition of (and attentive listening to) Griffiths’s own historiographical intervention, made via her self-created and deliberately preserved archival record as well as her published autobiographical writing and interviews. Research into the Linda Griffiths fonds sheds new light on the early years of her career (1971–75) that have yet to be discussed in existing studies and rectifies misrepresentations of her story, repositioning her in the field of Canadian theatre. This methodology also sheds new light upon the analysis of her plays. In the case of O.D. on Paradise, by returning attention to this overlooked text the author discovered a multifaceted moment within Griffiths’s growth as a playwright which intertwines with the play’s historical importance. Research into Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen revivifies the scholarly discussion on this well-known auto/biographical piece by perceiving Griffiths’s voice within her archive and in performance as insisting Canadian women artists be heard, believing in the lasting power of their work. Therefore, by listening to this creator’s voice within her self-curated archive, the author’s methodology enables a shifting of knowledge regarding Griffiths’s contributions to Canadian theatre, the remembering of lost histories, and the lasting effects of performance.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".