Narration in the Transitional Cinema: The Historiographical Claims of the Unauthored Text
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though our knowledge of the transitional era has increased substantially over the last few decades, incorporating studies of pivotal institutions, exhibition and reception contexts, and forces of regulation and circulation, formal analysis of the period’s films is still indebted to the singular example of D.W. Griffith, identified as the instigator of the “narrator system” in Tom Gunning’s influential book, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative Film. But the historical accident that resulted in Griffith’s films surviving when those of his contemporaries largely disappeared has defined most historians’ approach to charting a history of narrational changes during the pivotal years of 1908-1913. Rather than challenge Griffith’s importance as an enterprising and influential filmmaker, historians require the means to better contextualize Griffith’s contributions, rewriting in the process a formal history that can incorporate authorship without being defined by it as a governing principle. To this end, this essay will use the opportunity provided by the ongoing restoration and distribution of Thanhouser films from 1910-1913 to investigate how the “unauthored text” from this period can aid in our endeavours to expand the contours of the historiography of the transitional era.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".