Word of Mouth: Strange Corridors, Dizzying Syntax, and the Unexpected Echoes of Underwhich Editions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Underwhich Editions was a publishing collective and music imprint under which a group of Canadian writers, sound poets, and electronic sound explorers released books, chapbooks, postcards, broadsides, one-folds, leaflets, handmade editions, cassettes, microfiche, floppy disks, and CDs. It was a freeform outlet for their interests in linguistic, sonic and visual experiments. Active from 1978 through the ‘90s, Underwhich had a revolving cadre of contributors, including at various times, Michael Dean, Brian Dedora, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, John Riddell, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steven Ross Smith, Susan Andrews Grace, Richard Truhlar, and Mara Zibens. The cohort represented a communal DIY ethos, that acted in collective opposition to mainstream publishing and recording industries. Utilizing affordable and accessible technologies, such as letterpress, home-recording, Letraset, cassette duplication, xerox, and desktop publishing, the artists where able to circumnavigate impervious and top-down industry structures to create and distribute challenging cultural artifacts and objets d’art within a niche, but world-wide network. Throughout its lifetime, the group pushed against the boundaries of conventional poetic expression, creating works that utilize nonsense, visual forms, synthesized sound, dysfluent speech, textual appropriation, errors, technical malfunctions, computer code, musical experiments, and consumer electronics. The Underwhich Audiographics Series, which released over 40 albums of sound poetry, electronic and avant-garde compositions, set the endeavour apart from a typical publishing outlet, announcing an interest in expanded poetic form and emergent technologies, both of which define the overall project. Examining the relationship between audio and publishing technologies and their distribution networks, this paper demonstrates the ways in which Underwhich was able to employ the independent spirit and innovative methodologies of both to help disseminate their own releases. The Audiographic Series also links the collective endeavour to the oral tradition of poetry, re-establishing this historical origin, after poetry became mute on the page for much of the 20th Century. To date, no comprehensive bibliography or discography of Underwhich exists, and the inclusion here will be an aid for further research on the collective, or generally on Canadian avant-garde writing, publishing practice, electronic music, and sound poetry.
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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".