A shock to thought: Curatorial judgment and the public exhibition of ‘difficult knowledge’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many institutions of social memory have moved away from a singular emphasis on affirming presentations of patriotism, triumph and great deeds toward an appreciation of the potential for aggression inherent in human relationships. The result has been a proliferation of practices of remembrance related to violence, loss and death, topics often characterized as ‘difficult knowledge’. This is amply illustrated within contemporary museum practices. Exhibitions commonly understood as offering ‘difficult knowledge’ have concerned not only histories of violent conflict and traumatic loss, but the aftermath of such. Despite this commonplace understanding, it remains important to consider what it is about such exhibitions that render them ‘difficult’ and what might be achieved by making these painful histories public. These questions are explored through a series of comparative studies of varying museum exhibitions that, while drawing from the same archive of images and documents, have presented them in different ways.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".