The Likeness of Fugitivity: William Notman's<i>Carte-de-visite</i>Portrait of John Anderson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1861, in his Montreal studio, the Canadian photographer William Notman (1826–1891) took a carte-de-visite portrait of the fugitive African-American John Anderson, who had fled to Canada to escape slavery in the US. Subsequently, examples of this portrait had been sold at abolitionist events. This essay explores visual strategies underlying the production of this image, at a time when Anderson had become the focus of a transatlantic extradition case that received extensive international media attention. The paper argues that the carte-de-visite functioned strategically to situate Anderson among free subjects by using a visual language of composure and stability, while relying also on a certain societal distance between Anderson and his many advocates. It shows too how Anderson, when posing for the carte-de-visite, negotiated the tensions between ‘objecthood’ and ‘subjecthood’ within a transatlantic context. Finally, it compares Notman's carte-de-visite with other examples of antislavery visual culture, such as the Wedgwood slave medallion, a daguerreotype abolitionist button and other depictions of Anderson.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".