MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2474450054

Chinese Restaurants' Interior Decor as Ethnographic Objects in Newfoundland 1

2016· article· en· W2474450054 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Mu Li

Bibliographic record

VenueWestern Folklore · 2016
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicCulinary Culture and Tourism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFolkloreEthnic groupSociologyEthnographyMetaphorRealmDeconstruction (building)Gender studiesIdentity (music)Folk cultureMedia studiesVisual artsAnthropologyAestheticsHistoryArtArchaeologyEngineering
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In order to present culture of overseas restaurants, descendant of restaurateurs, Karen Tam (who grew up restaurant called Aux Sept Bonheurs in Montreal neighborhood of Rosemont) launched project entitled Gold Mountain Restaurants (2002-2010) to exhibit physical interior of traditional restaurants across Canadian small cities and towns. According to Tam, restaurants that she grew up around and knew well are sites for formation of ideas about ethnicity; her aim in deconstruction and reconstruction of restaurants is to see which elements signify meaning for public and, thus, play role in influencing Western perceptions of Chinese (Karen Tam 2013). A restaurant, in mind of Tam, is a metaphor for an imaginary China, imagined by and as place recreated by in West (Tam 2006). Tam's installed restaurants featured only space itself (not food) and tangible items such as decor and furniture, which aspects she views as cultural elements that are significant but that have not been well studied in folklore studies on ethnic culinary traditions or in material culture studies in realm of folklore and ethnicity. An exception is Shalon Staub's study of Yemenis in New York City (1989). In addition to discussing food, Staub looks at names, signs, and decor of Yemeni restaurants as representing stage of ethnic cultural performance. This challenges the dominant voices in field of ethnic studies to consider construction of ethnic identity as fluid process of social boundary negotiation with variable cultural content (Staub 1989:11). Staub's work represents few instructive attempts by folklorists to understand relationship between architectural elements and ethnicity.In same vein, Lily Cho, writing of western Canada, argues, Of course, restaurant is more than food that it serves-it has an architecture; it is gathering space; it is kitchen and dining area and swinging doors which contact two; it is menu and space of counter (Cho 2010:14). In addition to serving dishes, some restaurants also promote their exoticism and/or authenticity through decorations that include various symbols. Karen Tam's installation investigates sense of tradition in restaurants in terms of physical space and suggests that roles of architecture and interior decor of those restaurants serve not only as supplemental elements to attract business but also as important markers of changing pace of immigration patterns and immigrant identities, such as what Lily Cho saw during her visits to Tam's exhibitions (Cho 2010:109-130). In this sense, decors of restaurants become ethnographic artifacts or objects of ethnography, which Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines as follows:Ethnographic artifacts are objects of ethnography. They are artifacts created by ethnographers. Such objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segemented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers. They are ethnographic, not because they were found in Hungarian peasant household, Kwakiutl village, or Rajasthani market rather than in Buckingham Palace or Michelangelo's studio, but by virtue of manner in which they have been detached, for disciplines make their objects and in process make themselves. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:17-18)In this article, inspired by Tam, I trace changes of those ethnographic artifacts in architectural and interior decor of restaurants in Newfoundland, easternmost province of Canada, to explore interplay of interior spatial arrangements in restaurants and exterior social space of diaspora in various social and cultural contexts.AN EARLY SOCIOECONOMIC HISTORY OF CHINESE IN NEWFOUNDLANDThe first arrival of to Newfoundland can be traced to 1890s, when Newfoundland had not yet brought into confederation (Adams 2001:35; Daily News, 19 August 1895; Ping 1995). …

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.246
Threshold uncertainty score0.495

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.005
Science and technology studies0.0120.005
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.242 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2016
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueWestern FolkloreSame topicCulinary Culture and TourismFrench-language works237,207