“[L]ike a page from history”? A Half-Century of Death Notices in <i>The Globe and Mail</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term obituary is commonly applied to death notices as well as to professionally written obituaries despite important differences in the two genres. Death notices, authored by bereaved families, who pay for their publication, appear to have received less, and sometimes less respectful, attention from journalists and scholars than obituaries of the noteworthy written by professionals. The focus of this article is the first of these commemorative forms. Based on a sampling of death notices in The Globe and Mail from 1970 to the near present, the article analyzes and accounts for changes in the genre. Barebones and sober in 1970, death notices evolved, albeit slowly, over the next several decades until, in the 21st century, they have become a lengthy and fulsome celebration of a life, a determined attempt to vivify the deceased’s unique personality. Their content reflects both the era when their subjects were in their heyday and the narrative choices that their biographers make in presenting their life and values. It also reflects the growing influence of the funeral industry and the media. The article contends that, the obvious airbrushing notwithstanding, death notices are a valuable source for scholars, providing a wealth of information about such matters as the significance, and signifiers, of social class, gender, religion, and family values in the fashioning of the deceased’s identity. As the study of death notices is extended to other newspapers, including those in rural and small-town Canada, it will provide further opportunity for analyzing private commemorative practices and in doing so complement existing studies of public and monumental styles of commemoration.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".