Bibliographic record
Abstract
In place of comprehensive data describing the broader role of literary agents – most of whom were women – in the shifting ecosystem of twentieth-century Canadian publishing, this chapter focuses on three pioneering agents, all based in Toronto, Ontario: Sybil Hutchinson, who in 1950 was the first to cofound a literary agency in Canada; and Lucinda Vardey and Bella Pomer, two enterprising figures who in 1977 and 1978 respectively established their own agencies. Together, these women spearheaded a business model for agency work and consolidated the role of the professional literary agent by mediating with editors and publishers and effecting significant improvement in conditions for authors. They fought to place the work of Canadian writers with domestic and international publishers, negotiated improved publishing contracts and royalty advances, and promoted Canadian authors at home and around the globe. Today, it would be accurate to describe their determination to disrupt and reinvigorate the culture of publishing and authorship in Canada as a broadly feminist practice enacted through vision and method.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".