Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does it feel to encounter a writer through his or her archive? In this piece of creative non-fiction, I explore my encounter with Malcolm Lowry through his archive at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver: specifically, through a set of love-notes written to his wife, Margerie Bonner, and through his ‘Last Notebook’, a tiny notebook kept during the Lowrys’ trip to Northumberland and the Lake District in summer 1957, just weeks before Lowry’s death. I reflect on the sense of connection across time created by this encounter with a writer’s archive, and connect this to the way that Lowry himself explores the same sense of connection in his short story ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’. I consider what type of text a writer’s notebook might be, particularly whether or not we might agree with Kirsty Gunn’s claim that a writer’s notebook is the ‘most private’ type of writing, and I reflect on what my own responses to Lowry’s notes to Margerie and ‘Last Notebook’ might tell us about our relationship, as readers, to those writers who matter the most to us.
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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".