Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843-1933/terre-Neuve: Anthologie Des Voyageurs Français, 1814-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
P. O'Flaherty, Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843-1933 (St John's, NL: Long Beach Press, 2005), viii + 514pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-9680-9983-1. R. Rompkey, Terre-Neuve: Anthologie des voyageurs francais, 1814-1914 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 304pp. 18.00. ISBN 2-8684-7966-9. Regional identities are vulnerable in the brave new world of global homogenisation. Distinct cultures can raise protective bulwarks against such influences if spokespeople celebrate and interpret their essence for present and future generations. Newfoundland, a country 'lost' (or maybe protected) within Canada's consoling bosom, is a case in point. Gifted with atrocious weather, a scarcely inhabitable interior and perilous means of livelihood, the island has bred a hardy, quirky, poetic people with a fine store of dialect, songs and jokes. The books under review were written by two Newfoundland-born defenders of their homeland's uniqueness. Both completed PhDs in London before returning to teach in the Department of English at Memorial University. Patrick O'Flaherty's interpretation of Newfoundland literature (The Rock Observed, 1979), his presentation of its history in photographs (Part of the Main, 1983) and his sardonically affectionate guide for tourists (Come Near at Your Peril, third edition 1998) were instrumental in developing my love for the place. Ronald Rompkey's acclaimed biography of a missionary legend (Grenfell of Labrador, 1991) was also formative for me (Grenfell went to school in Parkgate near Chester, where I wolfed potted shrimps as a lad). A former director of the Smallwood Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Rompkey is on the board of directors of The Rooms, the startling new archive and heritage centre looming over St John's. O'Flaherty's Lost Country is a continuation of his well-received Old Newfoundland: A History to 1843 (St John's, 1999). A narrative history predominantly, though not exclusively, about politics from 1843 to 1933, when the imperial government resumed control of a country with zero credit rating, Lost Country was expressly intended for the general reader. There is evidence of extraordinarily wide reading behind the text, which in many places is dense, concentrated and requires more attention than I personally think the soundbite-oriented general reader will tolerate. There are lively touches, such as a reference to the folly of stuffing children's noddles with Gray's Elegy when they were destined to spend their lives in the fishery, or when the British navy's patrols along the French shore are depicted as ineffective 'leisurely jaunt[s]', or the point around 1909 when motorboats 'with their characteristic putt-putt' broke 'the immortal silences of remote inlets and coves'. …
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 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".