Contexts for reading the reader: why the private library of a twentieth-century Canadian woman is important
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An article on a library collected in the twentieth century by a Canadian woman may seem of little relevance to a topic called “A way with words”. Still, one of the many contexts in which we read books is their existence as objects in various kinds of libraries. This article’s subject is a library of over seventeen hundred books accumulated in the twentieth century in a modest house on a modest street in the mid-sized city of Brantford, Ontario, by a woman who had graduated from high school, but who would now be considered to have had a modest education. As well as gathering these books, she read them. In most she signed her name; in many she recorded such information as the date of their acquisition; and, although she did not usually mark them up, she sometimes left objects in them. Over the years she also listed them in notebooks. When she died, her nephew boxed the books in no particular order. Since then, they have been moved several times, and more than half have disappeared. Over six hundred of the books, however, have survived and are now deposited in the MacOdrum Library at Carleton University, Ottawa. While I had these books in my house, I prepared lists of them in alphabetical order according to author, and I arranged them alphabetically in bankers’ boxes. As I reorganised this library, I was impressed with what it revealed about not only Bibliography and Textual Studies, including the History of the Book, particularly as these subjects concern Canada, but also about such topics as Canadian culture and the influence of books and reading on the shaping of images of women in the twentieth century. My article demonstrates the importance of this private library’s “way with words”.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".