Early twentieth century women reading through disability and illness: Letters to Canadian novelist Ralph Connor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ralph Connor was a well-known novelist in the first decade of the twentieth century. Many people read his popular fiction novels around the world. Perhaps owing to his popularity and penchant for keeping correspondence, his collected papers, held the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, include over six hundred fan letters. I examined these letters with the intention of exploring women’s responses to popular fiction of the era and the reasons they were reading. As I read the letters, a recurring theme emerged in letters penned by women: they described the role of reading in their lives in relation to their personal experiences with disabilities and chronic illness. Others wrote about the experience of reading to their mothers, sisters, or friends with disabilities. These fan letters are the voices of women with disabilities who were relegated to the margins of society. Ultimately, the letters reveal the role of reading as a leisure activity, a vocation, and a social outlet in the lives of early twentieth century women who identified themselves as invalids, shut-ins, and bedbound.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.075 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".