Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. By Martha Langford. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. x + 241, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth) Photography has become a key ingredient in folklore fieldwork; there are few folklorists who do not record on film some of the contexts in which they undertake their research, thus producing images of informants, performances, or places. As a cultural document, however, the photograph extends well beyond our own efforts to create a record for our own research. There is a wealth of photographic images made by others, for various purposes, which encode cultural knowledge that may be of much interest to us. It then becomes necessary to consider how to interpret such images in order to add to our understanding of some context we may be examining. Martha Langford's Suspended Conversations offers insightful approaches to interpreting photographic albums, that is, to examining a certain kind of collection of photographs. Of course not every context offers the possibility of looking at albums, but theassembling of photographic albums was a very popular endeavor in certain times and places, and where albums are available, they offer the hope of providing valuable information. I became aware of their potential in the 1970s when engaged in a project in historical ethnography that involved interviews with Britons who had lived in colonial India. A number of my informants had compiled photo albums for that period in their lives; in come cases these were meticulously assembled and maintained, often in rather grand albums. They not only served to provide me as an interviewer with a visual counterpart to oral accounts but also stimulated those accounts in the first place. I later bought from a dealer an album which I used in an exhibition because it demonstrated so nicely, via pages which alternated family life in England with the life of a family member in India, the fluidity of movement between metropolitan country and colonial existence. What actually an album can reveal depends, of course, upon the album itself and what one is looking for. Langford's book is useful in that it gives us a number of analyses of particular albums and also a chapter on previous uses of albums by scholars (including those of the Smithsonian Family Folklore project) and artists. Langford sees previous attempts to look at the photographic album, whether by scholars, critics or artists, as having been overly concentrated on the idea of the album rather than on careful analysis of particular, actual albums. Her own book aims to get around that problem by drawing upon the large collection of albums at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. …
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".