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Record W7105676250 · doi:10.1093/escrit/cgaf019

Composing ‘The Nightfishing’

2025· article· en· W7105676250 on OpenAlexaff

Bibliographic record

VenueEssays in Criticism · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPosthumanist Ethics and Activism
Canadian institutionsTrinity College
Fundersnot available
Keywordsnot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION OF ‘THE NIGHTFISHING’ in 1955, Norman Macleod wrote to W. S. Graham, enquiring about the possibility of perusing the poem’s early drafts. Graham obliged, sending his friend excerpts of a version of the text from 1949. Attached to the materials is a self-effacing preface which remains unpublished. Held at the National Library of Scotland (along with the bundle of drafts itself), it reveals his anxiety about revisiting the early iterations of his work. ‘I can hardly say that this’, he writes to his friend, ‘is the embryo Nightfishing. However let us say, Norman, it is the ghost of an ancestor embryo of the NF. Or an early “Eine Kleine Nacht Fishin”’. He observes how, poring ‘over these excerpts now, when the present NF has been settling in for about 6 years, it gives me quite a shock to find just how unfirm and “cloudy” the texture of the verse is’. The opening of the draft, in particular, is marked out as being especially uncanny: its ‘first section is almost like another poem when I read it now. Not a very good one’.1

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.024
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.013
Threshold uncertainty score0.051

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.024
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.064
Scholarly communication0.0100.010
Open science0.0020.005
Research integrity0.0130.015
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.342 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

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