The Impossibility of Representation: A Semiotic Museological Reading of Aboriginal Cultural Diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By undertaking a semiotic analysis of the Canadian Museum of Civilization depiction and celebration of Aboriginal cultural diversity we question the constructed nature of the representations therein and how these representations encourage us-visitors to read the gallery as mirroring ‘the real’ of Aboriginal cultures. Located in Ottawa, Canada, we chose one exhibition within the Museum where we identified key messages that encouraged us-visitors to attach an abstract notion of Aboriginal diversity to the texts. Through abstraction, the selection of objects and images, we argue, take on a connoted meaning which enables them to stand in for or represent an abstract concept of diversity. As important sites of critical curriculum studies (Ibrahim, 2004), we suggest through what we are calling ‘semiotic pedagogy’ that educators and learners take a critical reading of such exhibitions, with particular attention to the way the logic of the narratives presented reinforces or disrupts (their) notions of Aboriginal cultures.
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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".