Performance of Language: A Comparative Linguistic Study of News About China and Italy During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Canadian News Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The project is a comparative linguistic study on the COVID-19 coverage about China and Italy during the first 3-months of 2020 from the Canadian news program The National. It includes a research paper and a website featuring an animation displaying information silenced by mainstream media. The theoretical framework of the paper is situated within language ideology and is guided by Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies methodology. Through patterns discovered in the research, it aims to detect the contrareity in the language that The National used between the two countries, and the strategies employed in the performance of “respectable racism” (Antonius, 2002) on China. The animation enunciates the incongruity between the two countries by juxtaposing the prejudiced words used implicitly in China’s corpora with the words in Italy’s corpora. This project hopes to disrupt the status quo in the information dissemination dictated by mainstream media which ostracizes the Chinese community and divides Canadians.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".