A Question of Identity: Exploring Cultural Assimilation Through Writing Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This creative writing assignment is my submission for the final BA project in English at the School of Humanities at the University of Iceland. The assignment consists of Part I of my novel The Simple Life, which is approximately 30,000 words, followed by an exposition on the writing process, which is about 5,500 words. \nThe Simple Life is a literary novel focusing on a young girl, Anna, and her move from Iceland to Canada in the 1970s. In Canada, Anna’s mother Ella hopes to find a simpler life than the one she has been living. However, her attempt is misguided, as she fails to recognise that one cannot escape the ghost of the past by simply relocating to a new country. The story is told through the point of view of Anna, who struggles to cope with the demands of a new culture and her own mother’s betrayal of her, while simultaneously watching her mother decline into her own private hell, with catastrophic results. \nThe exposition traces the process of writing the book, and discusses what I hoped to achieve in terms of characterisation, plot, setting and theme. Through this work I try to explore the question of identity, in particular cultural identity, and the meaning of emotional legacy when it comes to creating a new life for oneself. Unfortunately due to the length of the novel I was only able to submit Part I, and not the whole work as I would have preferred. I nevertheless hope that it is able to provide a clear indication of what I have learned, and of what I am capable as a writer.
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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".