Reading the farm in prairie literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine some elements of an agricultural myth in several mid- to late-twentieth-century texts of the Canadian prairie. One of these elements of the agricultural myth is the figure of the farmer and the way it functions as a mediator between nature and our perception of it. I also trace the farmer's domination over, yet subservience to, the land through agriculture and how literature represents that contradiction. The third strand considers the evolution of agriculture to agribusiness. And finally, I trace how all of these ideas are manifested in the agrarian site--the house, barn, field, and garden--and the various movements between and among them. I offer a socially-oriented counterpoint to previous works that have been, on the whole, psychological and thematic, such as Henry Kreisel's and Laurence Ricou's studies. As well, I draw on Robert Thacker's "great prairie fact" and Dick Harrison's focus on writing as a cultural phenomenon in order to position an agricultural myth. My main texts, which I examine in detail, cover an array of genres: Sinclair Ross's The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind, Robert Kroetsch's "Seed Catalogue," and 25th Street Theatre's Paper Wheat.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".