Laying Tracks and Tracking Change: An Interrogation of Nostalgia, National Identity, and the Railway in Contemporary Photography
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: From the time of the earliest photographs commissioned to document the construction of the railway, the camera and the train have enjoyed a mutually beneficial, almost symbiotic, relationship, and despite, or perhaps owing to, the parallel decline of both traditional forms in more recent decades, the two technologies remain remarkably intertwined. This project examines the work of two contemporary artists, Scott Conarroe and Mark Ruwedel, whose photographs depict the enduring presence of the railway industry throughout North America. Exploring the coeval development of photography and the railway and the contribution of both to the construction of national identity in the nineteenth century, I interrogate the two technologies’ shared relevance to questions of transportation, communication, and perception in the present, in order to explore how a nation or community is affected by infrastructure that remains from technologies that once were vital to its creation and unification. Providing a critique of the growing literature on nostalgia, I argue that ethical engagement, both within the present and in regards to the past, depends upon an acknowledgement of the heterotemporality of space and the heterogeneity of time.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it