Flann O’Brien and the Irish ‘Radio-Mind,’ 1926-1976
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event up to the 1930s and is critical to the oeuvre. It aims to understand broadcast radio in the context of its modernist, popular and avant-garde resonances by claiming that texts written for unrecorded, live radio production rely on a broadcasting frame that is socially and politically constructed. The referent is not the radio-text per se, but the context of live radio broadcasting. The central role of communications technology in O’Nolan’s life and work revolves around his early radio exposure and experience. Critical methodologies that aim to examine an autonomous body of work for radio by a single author disregard the aesthetics of collaboration, in-between-ness, and technological constraints inherent in radio production during this period. Engaging this context, this article begins with the global development of radio in the 1920s and 30s, before moving onto Irish radio, and then considers theories of radio and sound that were emerging at the time O’Nolan began publishing his early work, which in turn demonstrates the centrality of the wireless as a technological context for Flann O’Brien studies, for late-modernism, and for the popular imagination in twentieth-century Ireland.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".