The stars on the page, the voice in the sky : myth, Ovid and the Cree elders in Robert Bringhurst's Ursa Major
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian poet, translator, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst is a 21st-century humanist of penetrating lucidity and intellectual alertness. Since the early 1970s he has been composing a poetic oeuvre that is woven out of beautifully tessellated threads from various literary traditions. For over thirty years now he has been writing poems for multiple voices where he seeks to emulate the manyvoiced or polyphonic nature of reality. To this end, he looks back to the old in their knowing, not just the Pre-Socratic poet-philosophers, but also the Oriental sages and the myth-tellers of the oral literatures of the First Nations. This article explores a universal myth from Mediterranean and Amerindian traditions as expressed in the book-length poem Ursa Major. A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers (2003), a complex object art that sheds lights on timeless universals pertaining to humankind in its entirety in spite of the passage of time – the timeless desire for happiness and for knowledge.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".