Review of <i>Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary.</i> Edited byMarta Dvorak and Manina Jones
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This collection, which emerges from papers given at the Carol Shields colloquium held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in March 2003, ranks alongside Edward Eden and Dee Goertz's Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction (2003) as a significant addition to Shields scholarship. As its title suggests, the focus of the volume is Shields's multifarious engagement with-and subversion of-categories of "ordinariness" and "extraordinariness" in her fiction, although some of the thirteen essays address this theme rather tangentially. Like Narrative Hunger, the collection opens with a previously unpublished essay written by Shields herself, in this case ''A View from the Edge of the Edge," in which she assesses her position as a female Canadian writer and her ambivalent relationship to a literary tradition that has tended to marginalize work on both national and gender grounds. Ranging in an erudite but witty and accessible manner from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the books that occupied her parents' shelves to a shrewd analysis of contemporary literary culture, the piece serves as a valuable reminder of the perceptiveness of Shields's insights, her elegance in expressing them, and how much these qualities have been missed since her death.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.006 |
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".