Le français et les Franco(phone)s: An exploration of the evolving significance of French in Maine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
French language and cultures have a long and rich history in Maine thanks to centuries of cultural exchange with Canada, and the Franco-American communities which developed in the state as a result. Additionally, many new French speakers have immigrated to Maine over the last 25 years from Togo, the DRC, Djibouti, Rwanda, and other French-speaking countries in Africa. This thesis seeks to open a conversation about how the role and importance of French in Maine is evolving as the range of French speakers in the state expands and diversifies. In reflection of the multilingualism this project celebrates, the first half of the paper is written in French and the second half is written in English. The French section traces the history of French in Maine and uses the post-colonial theories of "la Créolité" conceptualized by Bernabé et al and "la créolisation" conceptualized by Edouard Glissant in order to demonstrate the linguistic and cultural possibilities presented by the past, present, and future of French and French-speaking cultures in Maine. The English section focuses on community perceptions of the role and importance of French in Maine, drawing from governmental reports on Maine's Franco-American communities, results of a survey conducted for this project, and information garnered from interviews with several community members. Either section can be read and understood independently, but the full picture of the evolving importance of French language and cultures in Maine comes through the combination of these multiple languages and perspectives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".