Review of <i>Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture,\nand History</i> Edited by Robert Wardhaugh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prair'ie n. a large treeless tract of level or undulating grassland esp. in N. America. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)\n"How does one define a place? How does one define a region?" asks editor Robert Wardhaugh. Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism have problematized the concept of definition in general and definition of place in particular. In this age of posts-, the dictionary becomes a site of misplaced signposts bent on leading one astray. No matter the limitations of "definition," the Prairies can no longer be defined solely in a narrow, physical sense. Rather, we must "move beyond the transparency of geography to recognize the prairies as socially constituted space," as essayist Alison Calder notes. Because regional identity is shaped by individual and collective consciousness as well as by geography, it evolves dynamically over time. This compilation of thirteen essays, conceived as conference papers, constitutes "an attempt to highlight recent approaches 'toward defining the Prairies.'"\nThe jacket's promise that the contents are "as diverse as the region itself" is belied by both the essays' disciplinary representation and scope. Because eight are literary, including all in the second half, the reader is left with the sense that this collection is essentially literary criticism. Further, although several authors critique the homogeneity of conventional Prairie representations, only one address aboriginal issues at any length, with Royden Loewen's study of Mennonite diaries the only other extensive examination of a marginal community. A third complaint involves the sometimes tenuous connection between the anthology's ostensible purpose and individual essays. Although Wardhaugh's introduction suggests that Alvin Finkel's analysis of Alberta's Social Credit government's resistance to federal policies is contextualized by other Prairie Provinces, this isn't the case. Similarly, Wardhaugh's claim that Gerald Davidson posits climate as a determinant of Prairie "political and social structures" misrepresents the essay, however interesting Davidson's description of a scientific/historical approach to climate study may be.\nThese objections aside, the collection contains a number of strong pieces. Gerald Friesen's "Defining the Prairies: or, why the prairies don't exist," with its claim of the emergence of a "new West," is as provocative as its title suggests. R. Rory Henry illuminates a historically neglected field, the "Construction of Masculine Middle-Class Identity on the Canadian Prairies." And the playful exploration of the phrase "just prairie" by poet and novelist Robert Kroetsch, whose voice echoes through several of the essays, offers a fitting, if necessarily provisional, close to the text.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".