Operationalizing Canonicity: A Quantitative Study of French 19th and 20th Century Literature
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article delves into the literary canon, a concept shaped by social biases and influenced by successive receptions. The canonization process is a multifaceted phenomenon, emerging from the intricate interplay of sociological, economic, and political factors. Our objective is to detect the underlying textual dynamics that grant certain works exceptional longevity while jeopardizing the transmission of the majority. Drawing on various criteria, we present an operational framework for defining the French literary canon, centered on its contemporary reception and emphasizing the role of institutions, particularly schools, in its formation. Leveraging natural language processing and machine learning techniques, we unveil an intrinsic norm inherent to the literary canon. Through statistical modeling, we achieve predictive outcomes with accuracy ranging from 70% to 74%, contingent on the chosen scale of canonicity. We believe that these findings detect what Charles Altieri calls a “cultural grammar”, referring to the idea that canonical works in literature serve as foundational texts that shape the norms, values, and conventions of a particular cultural tradition. We posit that this linguistic norm arises from biased latent selection mechanisms linked to the role of the educational system in the canon-formation process.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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