Bibliographic record
Abstract
Martha A. Sandweiss's Print the Legend is a magnificent work and a definitive synthesis of the nineteenth-century West's photographic visual culture. The book treats several intertwined histories. One thread follows the history of photography as a medium from the daguerreotype era of the 1840s, through the bulky glass-plate era beginning in the late 1850s, to the 1890s, when roll film made “kodakery” a national pastime. Another thread weaves the history of the trans-Mississippi West, beginning with the Mexican-American War, to the great western surveys and the invention of Native Americans as a “vanishing race.” In each of seven tightly argued chapters, Sandweiss looks at public photographs in order to map the cultural work those images performed in the context of their original production and circulation. A key argument concerns photography's uneven success in narrating the hyperbolic story of western expansion. Sandweiss demonstrates, for example, that the unique, literal-minded daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War were unable to compete with the popular painted panoramas of the antebellum period. In those panoramas, artists selected specific battle moments to narrate using the rhetoric of ethnocentric nationalism. After the Civil War, however, changes in technology made it possible to circulate photographic reproductions through stereo cards, printed albums, government reports, and other media. In those settings, the photograph's contingent meanings could be anchored and narrated by accompanying text. With this shift, it became possible to “print the legend”: not only did the accompanying text (or “legend”) direct the photograph's meaning, the text and image combination of, for example, an Edward S. Curtis photograph could seemingly confirm a preexisting “legend” of a “vanishing” race. Once the photographic image could be mechanically reproduced with a textual anchor, western photographs began to carry stories of the region's symbolic meaning: first, as the site of a young nation's future, rich in expansive spaces and natural resources; then, as America's past, as the photographs began to narrate the ideologically freighted “story of the inevitable and natural decline of its native peoples” (p. 206).
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.149 | 0.086 |
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".