Argillite, faux-argillite and black plastic: The political economy of simulating a quintessential Haida substance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hlgas7agaa or argillite is a type of carbonaceous shale that is found on Slatechuck Mountain, in Haida Gwaii. Since the 19th century, the Haida have been producing argillite carvings for sale, including small-scale totem poles. Argillite carvings are now a much revered art form, and the Haida remain the only ones to have direct access to this stone. However, various companies produce imitations of argillite carving in composite materials, with more or less success in producing the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of argillite. All these imitations, including those that are nowhere near achieving convincing simulation, acquire an added commercial appeal that distinguishes them from ‘plastic totem poles’ by evoking a symbolically, socially, economically, and culturally valued material. Arguably, this makes producers of argillite-like items indebted to those who have made argillite so valuable by carefully guarding it from outside circulation in raw form, namely the Haida.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".