Lost in the (national) archive: the Modern Girl, literary cultures, and the magazine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay forms part of a special online issue of modernism/modernity focusing on methods of reading the magazine, using the case study of Canada's "Western Home Monthly." It focuses on the way in which national, aesthetic, and sexual politics shape and exclude certain figures and stories from literary history, on the one hand; and on the opportunities afforded by studying magazines for revising traditional understandings of national literary history, and literary modernity, on the other. Once sidelined as merely commercial artefacts, magazines were long considered enemies of women and literary culture, both of which they promiscuously courted and entangled. More recent scholarship of magazines—beginning with important work of Margaret Beetham on Victorian periodials, and extending into the Modernist Journals Project, which inspired the Canadian equivalent Modern Magazines Project (out of which this essay cluster arises)—have highlighted their value in assisting scholars to understand what was widely read in its own time and place, in ways that force serious reconsiderations of the literary past. As Anne Ardis has observed, these reconsiderations have have important implications for understandings of literary modernism, more wedded as it typically is to the logics of cultural scarcity, and for broader understandings of literary modernity, including literary feminism. This essay is self-reflexive methods-based reading of one full year of this monthly periodical, October 1931-October 1932, which raises issues about how its stories featuring the Modern Girl (more typically known as the Flapper), challenge established understandings of literary, cultural, and feminist history of Canada.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".