“Time to die many times”: Negotiating Time in Letters between Couples during the First World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For young couples separated during the First World War, letters would become the primary means of maintaining their relationship. The narrative of time, both the subjective experience of time and the constant awareness of clock time, is strikingly visible throughout a range of correspondence and is central to how these writers negotiate their relationship through years of separation. This paper explores how the pain of separation was measured through time, as writers express the tensions between present separation, where letters construct the intimacy that was denied the couples in actuality, an idealized past togetherness, and a future time when war, and their separation, would be over. Yet these correspondents were not naïve enough to assume a future. Their lives were suspended: any future was conditional and precarious. Narrating their time together on a past leave, or fantasizing about a future, or using clock time as a point of intimate contact when they agreed on a particular time of the evening when each would think of the other, offered ways to contend with the precarity they are forced to face. Written to defy time, these letters are a legacy that allow us to enter the painful immediacy of that wartime experience.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".