The Multitudinous Sparseness of Space in Harry Thurston’s Broken Vessel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January and February 2000, Canadian poet-naturalist Harry Thurston (b. 1950) spent 35 days in the Sahara with a team of archaeologists conducting research at the Egyptian oasis of Dakhleh in the Western Desert. Confronted with the vastness of a territory at once foreign and familiar, he decided to respond to the experience of living in the desert with poems of haiku-like brevity he would write each day he spent on camp. The fruit of this spiritual experience was Broken Vessel (2007), a book that seeks to capture the mystery of the desert, a space that has held a century-long fascination for the human imagination. Following Tuan’s dichotomy of space vs. place, Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, and ecocritical concepts concerning ecopoetry as place-making, this article examines Thurston’s insights into the more-than-human world embodied by the desert, based on his firsthand observations and his imaginings of the known and revealed history of the Sahara.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".