Human Objects, Object Rights: from Elgin’s Marbles to Bullock’s Laplanders
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay probes the question of rights along the porous boundary between persons and things. Its broader framework is the rapid expansion of museums – and museum collections – in the Romantic period, but it examines in particular two episodes that in different ways mingle and merge bodies and objects. The first is the still-controversial acquisition of marbles from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, and their subsequent sale to the British Museum. The complex debates surrounding this transaction are ethical, political, and aesthetic in nature, but what is of interest here is the emphasis, on the part of contemporary commentators, on the uncanny life-likeness of the fragments. The second part of the essay considers this problem from another angle by examining William Bullock’s temporary exhibition, at his London Museum in 1822, of a family of Laplanders, their reindeer and sleds, and examples of their cultural and domestic artifacts. Body-object, object-body: this inversion, so resonant now in a critical climate engaged by thing theory and object oriented ontologies, takes on additional force in the emergent cultural economy of the Romantic museum, where the right to (and of) the object, and the place of the body, are provocatively on display.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.009 |
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 it