A century of Canadian obituaries: transforming ways in which people commemorate the deceased
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Obituaries represent one of the many rituals that the bereaved conduct following someone’s death. Like any ritual, these texts transform over time, and assume different forms depending on context. This study applies content and textual analysis to 3,300 obituaries, collected from six Canadian newspapers and spanning the years 1900–2021. This paper shares preliminary findings concerning transformations in the form and function of Canadian obituaries over time. Major changes in form include an immense growth in length. Relatedly, greater details shared about the deceased – including their family, occupation, and hobbies – indicates a functional shift from texts that announce death to ones which construct a life legacy. Finally, this paper attends to the importance of context in the study of obituaries, by highlighting major conventions in Canadian obituaries and comparing how they differ by region across Canada.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it