Blake, Liza, ed. Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Liza Blake's new edition of Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies, completed in collaboration with thirteen undergraduate research assistants, is a major work of scholarship that promises to be useful to both scholars and teachers of early modern literature.Blake's digital edition is the first critical edition of Cavendish's poetry.In other words, it is the first to be based on a collation of all three editions (1653, 1664, 1668) and the first to include full textual notes documenting all substantial variants.Cavendish's poetry has not always been widely available, and as a result, has been less read and less studied than some of her other works.This edition changes that and will open up new opportunities for the study and teaching of Cavendish's works.Blake's edition is an easy-to-navigate website that includes editions of all of the prefatory material and poems in Poems and Fancies.The site also includes two introductions: a critical introduction ("Reading Poems (and Fancies): An Introduction to Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies") and an extensive textual and editorial introduction that explains and justifies the editors' choices in the editing and presentation of the poems.A brief introductory landing page provides a description of the project and its contributors and a useful overview of how to navigate the site.All of the poems can be accessed from a Table of Contents on the left side of the screen.The Table of Contents is subdivided into several parts, displaying at a glance the complex organization of Poems and Fancies, which includes substantial prefatory material and five separate parts connected by interstitial sections labelled "Clasp." As Blake argues elsewhere on the website, poem arrangement is an important feature of Poems and Fancies that has not been widely recognized, and her edition makes this feature of Cavendish's poetry easy for readers to apprehend.Blake writes that one of the aims of the edition is to make Cavendish's poetry "freely available online for all to use, " and accessibility is certainly one of the edition's great achievements.But it is not the only one.The two substantial introductions included on the website make important contributions to scholarship on Cavendish's poetry specifically and on the challenges of editing early modern women's poetry more generally.The critical introduction makes
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
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".