The "Totem Poles" of Saint-Roch: Graffiti, Material Culture and the Re-Appropriation of a Popular Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1972–73 the Dufferin–Montmorency highway was thrust through the working-class neighbourhood of the Parish of Notre-Dame in the Saint-Roch district of Quebec City, expropriating the homes of nearly two thousand people and raising an entire parish. Traffic flow improved, but the rows of support columns for the suspended highway, as the parish priest of Notre-Dame remarked, passed directly over the heads of the poor, replacing the paroisse with a new religious icon: the cement pole. In time, this poignant metaphor, retold through the graffiti of local artists working beneath the overpasses of the highway, invested an anti-establishment icono-graphic power in the concrete highway supports. Recently, however, the totem poles of Saint-Roch have become the object of attention of Quebec as the city prepares for its four-hundredth birthday. While Quebec acts to promote renewal and national festivities in 2008, its use of state-aided subventions to replace graffiti with aesthetically-pleasing street murals in Saint-Roch threatens, as in the 1970s, to disorganise the area, this time through the gentrification and eradication of the totem poles of Saint-Roch. Resume En 1972-1973, l'autoroute Dufferin-Montmorency s'est imposee au voisinage de la paroisse ouvriere Notre-Dame dans le quartier Saint-Roch de Quebec, causant l'expropriation d'environ deux mille personnes et la suppression d'une paroisse complete. La fluidite de la circulation s'est amelioree mais, aux dires du cure de la paroisse Notre-Dame, les rangees de piliers soutenant l'autoroute suspendue s'elevaient directement au-dessus de la tete des pauvres, remplacant la paroisse par une nouvelle icone : les « mâts totemiques en beton ». A l'epoque, cette metaphore dramatique, evoquee par les graffitis des artistes locaux travaillant sous les viaducs, conferait aux piliers une puissance ico no graphique contre le pouvoir etabli. Ces derniers temps, toutefois, les « mâts totemiques » de Saint-Roch retiennent l'attention de Quebec qui se prepare a celebrer ses 400 ans. Alors que la ville prend des mesures pour promouvoir son renouveau et ses festi vites nationales en 2008, l'utilisation qu'elle fait des subventions de l'Etat, en remplacant les graffitis par des murales a l'esthetique engageante dans le quartier Saint-Roch, menace de bouleverser le secteur, comme en 1970, mais cette fois par l'em bour geoisement du quartier et l'eradication des « mâts totemiques » de Saint-Roch.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".