Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blackthorn City: A novel is a work of fiction that draws on alternate history and fabulist traditions to explore cultural and linguistic divisions and tensions in Montreal and in Quebec between Francophones, Anglophones, and Allophones (speakers of languages other than French and English), in a context of contemporary debates surrounding issues such as nationalism, globalism, and colonialism. Narrated by four narrators and stretching from the early 1960s to 2006, it tells the story of the blackthorn hedge that encircles Montreal in 1970 to protect Montreal’s French speakers from government overreach and police brutality, and of the ultimate destruction of the blackthorn hedge.\nIn the late 1960s, socialist and anti-colonialist protest movements in Montreal spark riots and terrorism. Michel, a Francophone student at McGill university, is pulled into political activism. His childhood friend Yvette, an amateur witch, is spurred to action after Michel is wrongly jailed for his activism; unintentionally, she works a magic spell that results in the growth of a tall and impenetrable hedge of thorns around the eastern, French-speaking areas of Montreal. The thorn-hedge gives rise to a new self-governing semi-autonomous area, the Free Community of Montreal.\nIn 1992, Michel’s daughter Celeste comes to Montreal for the first time after her mother is killed by political violence. Yvette takes responsibility for raising her to protect and manage the thorn-hedge. However, Celeste falls in love with Jude, a girl from the other side of the thorn-hedge, and repeatedly sneaks through the thorn-hedge to see her. The threat of political violence leads to their\nbreak-up. Later, a coup d’état shakes Montreal, forcing Celeste to flee to New York, and spurs Jude to involve herself in activism to take back control of the Free Community of Montreal. When Celeste and Jude finally meet again, years later, they find themselves on opposite sides as Jude seeks to protect Montreal from the increasingly conservative Canadian government. Ultimately, they reconcile and decide to end Montreal’s isolation from the rest of the world.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".