FROM SOUVENIR TO SOCIAL MOVEMENT: POSTSECRET, ART, AND POLITICS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Initiated by American artist Frank Warren, PostSecret is a contemporary art project that has turned into a cross-cultural phenomenon.What was once a localWashington, DC, event is now an exhibition touring in art galleries across North America that has been published in four collections (PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, My Secret: A PostSecret Book, The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book, and A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book) and published weekly on Blogspot.Warren’s PostSecret is a collection of postcards inscribed with secrets submitted by anonymous contributors. In this exhibit, ordinary individuals are given the opportunity to be artists who communicate their deepest, darkest secrets to an unknown audience. From the trivial to the profound, secrets become public acts of display.Using a cultural studies approach, we intend to deconstruct “the popular” that is PostSecret employing Stuart Hall’s notion of the dialectic of cultural struggle. How does PostSecret illustrate his idea of the “double movement” of containment and resistance vis-a-vis hegemonic culture? We argue that PostSecret both resists and reproduces dominant discourses and practices in writing, art, and culture by attempting to reconcile binary divisions within the content that reproduce fragmentation established by form. We explore this notion by examining PostSecret as a communication phenomenon that encompasses issues of authorship and audience, anxieties about high and low culture, and the implications of using a basic communicative medium like the postcard.We are interested in the prospect for empowerment and social change embedded in an exhibition that encourages victim narratives. However, there are concerns with the limitations inherent in PostSecret’s mainstream commercialization, which constructs it as entertainment. Potential for major social transformation is curtailed by an exhibition that fails to engage with or address the larger sociological problems (homophobia, sexism, racism) that cultivate these secrets in the first place. This is partly due to an exhibition that locates both social problems and solutions in fragmented confessional texts.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".