Between the Virtual and the Actual: Robert Barker's Panorama of London and the Multiplication of the Real in late eighteenth-century London1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The panorama is usually identified as the culmination, for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, of Enlightenment attempts to produce a “second-order reality in which to play with or practice upon the first order”. It is therefore aligned with the modern attempt to contain everything within a single view or picture. In contrast, this paper argues that in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century the panorama and the hyper-realistic illusions it conjured, paradoxically relied on and at the same time intensified the late eighteenth-century sense that first and second order realities (the “physical environment in which one is really present” and the environments presented by material or textual media) had diverged to a degree that was unprecedented. This at first somewhat counter-intuitive phenomenon occurs not despite but because of the panorama’s ability to simulate the real. The hyper-realistic virtual realities of the early panorama intensified late eighteenth-century interest in the observation of observation; presented perception as an event that did not require the presence of its apparent object, thus radicalising the achievements of Trompe l’Oeil painting; drew attention to the figural space of representation; and provided new evidence for the constructed and contingent nature of the real. The paper takes as its key foci Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above a sea of Mists” (1818), the Leicester Square Panorama (opened 1793), and Barker’s panorama of London (1791 and 1795).
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.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".