Moroni, Mario. Il libro dei primati / The Book of Primates. Trans. Mario Moroni with Olivia Holmes.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Where do the borders of fabulation meet the boundaries of the real?And who will cross that line?Readers might expect to find the first question raised in the works of Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, to name two well-traveled culprits.Cartographies of language and myth certainly inform Mario Moroni's peripatetic Il libro dei primati, a book that eludes easy categorization or, for that matter, easy review.First, it should be noted that Guernica has published the work in a bilingual edition.I say "the work" and "the book" because the normal modes do not adhere to it.The book contains both poetry and prose (and at times combines the two, alternating between them in single chapters, but also using a more prosaic, free-verse style as well as offering a poetic, recursive style of prose to readers).As such, the translation must contend with a diversity of modes, and Moroni and Holmes perform the job admirably.Furthermore, the book is well paginated, offering a page of Italian with its English "mirror" beside it; a novice reader of Italian who, stumbling upon a word or phrase, may then consult the English text without, in most cases, turning the page.In practical terms, the transition and pagination work well together and perhaps help readers to navigate the aforementioned formal confusion of the work, albeit inadvertently.To return to the first question: Moroni explores the boundaries where fabulation meets the real in many ways.These include typography, where the spacing of text on the page invites the crossing of borders (between prose and verse, for instance).It occurs again where the text ends and illustrations appear, printed between sections of the book, where readers find a historic map of the state of Maine, or the state of New York, or a drawing or painting.Is it a multi-media book?Yes, insofar as these illustrations help readers to map shifts from location to location.In doing so, the illustrations also help readers to follow other shifts in narration, tone, and characterization.Now, for the second question I asked: who crosses the line between fabulation and the real?Il libro dei primati develops a surrogate for the reader as it proceeds.In the early chapters, the book is subjective, relying upon impressionistic, discursive narration.At times the passive voice is used, as if the narration, and even what is narrated, were emerging from a numinous space, somewhere outside and before time.This is the first section, in which
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.011 |
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".