Serious play: Alden Nowlan, Leo Ferrari, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and their Flat Earth Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation concerns the satirical Flat Earth Society (FES) founded at Fredericton, New Brunswick in November 1970. The essay’s successive chapters examine the lives and literary works of three understudied authors who held leadership positions in this critically unserious, fringe society: FES Symposiarch Alden Nowlan; the Society’s President Leo Ferrari; and its First Vice-President Gwendolyn MacEwen. Therefore, my project constitutes an act of recovery and reconstruction, bringing to light cultural work and literary connections that have largely faded from view. Chapters show how certain literary writings by Nowlan, Ferrari, or MacEwen directly or indirectly relate to their involvement with FES, making the Society an important part of their cultural work rather than a mere entertainment, distraction, or hoax. These authors represent the local/regional inception of FES (Nowlan), its international influences and reach (Ferrari), and its Canadian context (MacEwen). Organized according to three jointly literary and geo-political layers, and drawing on little-known archival documents, each chapter records statements from the Society’s wider membership as they relate to Atlantic Canada, the international perspective, and Canada. Despite its aberrant and oppositional spirit, FES appeared within an identifiable cultural context and participated in a countercultural tradition that continues to this day. The Society’s surface lampoon embeds potent social critique and creative meaning. In other words, FES was not merely playful, nor merely serious, but interweaved these modes in a compelling way; the Society looks by turns intelligent and unintelligible, stupid and sophisticated. Further, it invited contributions from members and applicants: seldom-seen interpretations of “Planoterrestrialism” by individuals from many walks of life and now housed in archives at the University of New Brunswick and University of Calgary. The participatory, humorous, and poetic nature of FES means that its unusual brand of Flat Earthism cannot be tied to any singular ideology, place, or literary tradition. It operates as an enigmatic, errant, itinerant, and underground non-ideology. Planoterrestrial thought is reflected in the playful poetic styles of Nowlan, Ferrari, and MacEwen: three Society members who were nonetheless serious authors and sincere in their role as cultural workers, their Flat Earth antics not excepted.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".