Road work: Theorizing the road trip narrative in Anglophone, Quebecois and Indigenous literatures in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the title of J. Edward Chamberlin's book, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? suggests, you must fill a physical landscape with a history on that land in order to make it yours. Geography describes the land, and history peoples it, just as memories connect you to place. This is why road trips are such a feature of Anglophone, Quebecois and Indigenous writing in Canada, allowing the travelers to claim, at least symbolically, the land they cover. It is the intersection between history and geography that makes the trip so significant, and nourishes a sense of place, or reveals the lack of it. Examining the road trips undertaken therefore tells us much about the specific interests of the three general groups at the centre of this study. Their desire, and in some cases obligation to travel, the traveling companions and destinations they choose, and the histories they create on the land they are covering are indicative of their particular sense of place and nationhood within the country. The road trip narrative is a natural outcome of the nation's obsession with geography, and its desire to insert, or reinsert itself in history in order to ensure continuity. This is true of the Canadian nation as a whole, and also of the three communities in question. In order to demonstrate this, I examine works by a variety of Anglophone, Quebecois and Indigenous writers, including Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Linda Hogan, Scott Gardiner, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk and Paul Villeneuve. A comparative approach to literatures in Canada is the logical continuation of postcolonial studies in that it reveals the intricacies and specificities of various communities, contributing to a more complete understanding of multiple national collectivities.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".