Metaphor as a Vehicle for the Resurgence of a Minority Ontology in “A Ship-Shaped Hole in the Forest” by Ellen van Neerven
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In line with resurgent theories about First Nations peoples (Coulthard, Corntassel), this article shows how Ellen van Neerven’s poetic writing in Throat, specifically in “A Ship-Shaped Hole in the Forest”, does not merely lament the negative impact of colonisation but transforms the negative space hollowed out by the coloniser into a creative resource. The poem succinctly reminds the reader of the existence of an alternative view of the colonising event and voices an alternative ontology. At the same time, the sailing ship, that positive vehicle of British colonisation in Australia Day celebrations, is inverted to represent a historic violation the impact of which reverberates far back into deep time as well as into the present. The final part of the study builds on Paul Ricœur’s discussion of the iconicity that is specific to the poetic metaphor and of the kind of hermeneutic effort it requires of the reader (The Rule of Metaphor), in order to show how the semantic deconstruction/reconstruction process called for by the “ship-shaped” metaphor constitutes a form of heuristic action-writing that is part and parcel of Indigenous resurgence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".