Somewhere in the outer darkness: Locating the frontier (eco)gothic of Ambrose Bierce
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the pioneering American weird literature writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) through the critical lens of the ecogothic, arguing that he resituates the gothic within the real or imagined landscapes of the American frontier, his ‘frontier gothic’ epitomized by the image of ‘the cabin in the woods’. In his writings, the frontier gothic becomes transitional boundary genre on the ‘frontier’ between the earlier gothic and later folk horror, where not just isolated cabins of lone prospectors, but whole rural communities find themselves in a similarly abject, ruinous moral condition. The liminal ‘frontier’ nature of the ecogothic is repeated in miniature in the specific way in which abandoned cabins in isolated gulches become ecogothic ‘day-old’ ruins, quite distinct from a gothic ruin in its lacking civilized boundaries between interior and exterior, culture and nature, epitomized by the image of ‘blank windows’ and doorless doorways.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it