Eric Fillion, Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada’s Cultural Diplomacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eric Fillion'sDistant Stage is a unique and needed book for Canadians to better understand their relationship to Latin America and its impact on the country.The book focus on Montreal-born Jean Désy, Canada's first minister plenipotentiary and first Ambassador (1943-47 in Brazil, and on his innovative approach to use music and visual arts in order to strengthen bilateral relations.Due to Désy's initiative, in 1944 a bilateral cultural agreement was signed between the two countries, the first one ever for Canada.The book is unique on two fronts: it addresses a neglected topic, as if Canada never had a shared history with Brazil, or Latin America in general.It also innovates by focussing on culture and not on business as is usually the case for the few academic works that exist.Moreover, the book is a contribution to the understanding of cultural diplomacy and the role of Quebec (and Quebeckers) in Canada's international history.Finally, there is no other book that looks at South America as a stage for Canada's nation building.The author clearly shows how a closer proximity was important for both countries due to the changes brought by World War II -when Atlantic trading routes were disrupted, and the United States had an increasing economic and political influence in all of the Americas.Therefore, Brazil and Canada, two middle powers, attempted to use each other to counterbalance American dominance.This was especially relevant for Brazil, which had been quite active in pushing for diplomatic exchange, while Canada snubbed Brazil and other countries in the region.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.003 |
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.
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".