Charting material memories : an ethnography of visual and material transformations of woollen blankets in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking one thing—the industrially produced woollen blanket—as an object of investigation, this thesis sets out to bring together a study of aesthetics, materiality, and locality in relation to the woollen blanket to consider it as a possible “technology of enchantment” (Gell 1998) in both its original and transformed states. This dissertation investigates the aesthetic transformations of the woollen blanket into art, craft, and Indigenous cultural property within our current historical moment and within specific abstract and concrete localities. Two distinct locations, Aotearoa New Zealand and North America, where such acts of transformation upon woollen blankets have had a sustained presence, are examined and compared. This project attempts to address how focusing upon the acts of transformation of materials makes visible a gap in the literature where more consideration into the movement and consumption of materials simultaneously in multiple locations is needed. The dynamism of multi-vocal and, yet, intensely local uses and transformations of woollen blankets reveal that movement and consumption are together a single transformative act. What results from these acts of transformation are both tangible and intangible values that will be described through case studies of use in order to draw out the imagined futurity of woollen blankets in their ‘renewed’ forms against their historical and colonial legacies. The varied values that emerge from distinct aesthetic transformations enable a new reading of the importance of aesthetic and creative manipulations of materials and matter that informs the local take-up of an industrial product. This thesis pushes beyond a current analytical framework that has considered how objects come to be entangled in local and global meanings through either their social life or biography. Instead this thesis focuses on the intentional transformations of materials that inform larger critical arguments around how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and communities fashion cultural knowledge and identity through soft materials that are themselves manifestations of the hard-edged, imperial, colonial, and industrial projects.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".