Borderlands Dramatism: Pandemic Media Narratives of an American/Canadian Exclave
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic took a significant toll on borderlands communities in the United States and Canada. Point Roberts, Washington, a US exclave that exists geographically apart from the Washington State mainland, was no exception. During the US–Canada border lockdown that limited the movement of residents during the pandemic, media coverage oscillated between narratives of paradise and dystopia. National media outlets focused on the community’s low COVID-19 transmission rate but also its isolation and jurisdictional dysfunction. Despite these larger narratives that served national audiences with otherwise fleeting interest, media coverage also reshaped the way communities in the US–Canada borderlands are understood at a more granular level. This dynamic emphasized the agency of civic institutions and individuals during a global crisis. Through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad, an overview of Point Roberts’ media coverage during the pandemic is provided to understand the saga’s cross-border and binational implications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".