Bibliographic record
Abstract
This photo-essay constitutes an initial attempt to map out the forces and dynamics of capital at work in Fort McMurray, Alberta—a primary site of global oil extraction and a space that is now at the heart of the contemporary Canadian economy; it does so through the practice of ‘critical realism’ advocated by artist and critic Allan Sekula. The essay consists of three parts. In the first part, we describe the characteristics of Sekula’s critical realism, focusing in particular on his employment of this aesthetico-political practice in his book Fish Story (1991), an attempt to challenge dominant narratives about globalization as immaterial and unrepresentable by means of a focus on the transportation of goods by container ships. In the second part, we explore the challenge of representing another all-too frequently hidden material dimension of globalization: our continued dependence on oil and its by-products. Instead of focusing directly and literally on the site of oil extraction, the photo-essay we produce in the third part probes the effects of oil on life and labour in Fort McMurray. We do so in order to better understand the city’s specific socio-political challenges and to grasp the broader implications of oil for contemporary politics, culture and representation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".