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Record W4389675631 · doi:10.1353/nin.2023.a914841

Love It: Shoeless Joe

2023· article· en· W4389675631 on OpenAlex

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.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueNine · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican Literature and Humor Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAdventureReading (process)Art historyArtHistoryMedia studiesLiteratureSociologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Love ItShoeless Joe Willie Steele (bio) I can recall with great clarity the first time I saw Field of Dreams. It's a story I've retold dozens of times over the years, but the CliffsNotes version is this: while my brothers and some friends of ours went to see the latest installment of the Indiana Jones franchise in the summer of 1989, I went by myself across the theatre to see a movie about a guy who heard a voice, built a baseball field on his farm, brought Shoeless Joe Jackson back from the dead, and was eventually reunited with his own long-deceased father. Here is what I remember about first reading the novel on which that movie is based, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, sometime after I saw the movie. It might have been a month, or it might have been a couple of years, I really have no idea. What I can say with great confidence is this: I've read that book probably more than any other book ever. And while it's not my favorite novel—my students will tell you that spot is reserved for Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—I have to admit that I loved Shoeless Joe when I first read it, and I enjoy it as much today as I did back then, whenever that happened to be. Reading that book led me to my master's thesis, my doctoral dissertation, and eventually to Kinsella reaching out to ask if I'd be interested in writing his biography. Much of what I've done since then, including editing this journal, can be traced back to me reading Shoeless Joe that very first time. But that's not why I like the book. As a literature professor for more than twenty-five years, I've been trained to look for symbolism and tropes in an effort to unlock some type of hidden meaning or profound message. I will be the first to admit that this type [End Page 5] of approach has probably turned off more students from the joy of reading more than anything else in the history of education. Kinsella himself once told me that he never read an analysis of the symbolism in his work that told him something he hadn't already intended on being there. In fact, he was only partially kidding when he said he often placed certain symbols or references in his texts to give academics sexual gratification. The first question I ask any of my students, from first semester freshmen to soon-to-be graduates in a senior capstone course, is "What do you think about it?" This always leads to students telling me what they loved (or, more often than I would like, hated) about the text in question. I'll try to keep this question in mind as I write this response to Shoeless Joe. Not everyone will agree, and that's fine. When I was first asked to write this article, knowing someone would be writing a counter-narrative about why they don't like the book, I said I would do it with the stipulation that I wouldn't be allowed to see what the other author had written until after my manuscript had been finished. Admittedly I now wish that I could at least take a quick peek at what he or she wrote. After all, how could someone not like Kinsella's book? Every time Field of Dreams is mentioned on a large scale—for instance, before the first Major League Baseball game at the movie site in 2021—people on social media, sports columnists, and commentators feel the need to have a "hot take" about why the film is overrated and too sentimental, too unbelievable, too white, too patriarchal, too whatever. And people often feel compelled to retweet me or forward these articles, expecting me (I suppose) to be upset or to make some impassioned response about how wrong they are. I know the novel evokes the same types of reactions, as some people say this book isn't "real" literature, whatever that may mean. To those who expect such a...

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.353
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0120.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it