Building a Parc de la langue française / Retracing my steps as a designer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1979, Québec artist Rober Racine wrote a 190-word text that would describe his idea for Le Parc de la langue française, a landscape where one could literally meander through the French language. Although some partial iterations of this project have been presented over the years, the complete Parc has not been built. Yet. This thesis is my take on Rober Racine’s Le Parc de la langue française. In doing so, I found myself observing the design process itself, the making of a design project as well as my making as a designer. \n\tThis thesis has many questions. Where could you build it so it would be, as Racine envisioned, ‘permanent’? Emblematic Mount-Royal Park was the first answer. Then how to unfold Racine’s 190-word concertina vision into a 2,14 million m2 park? How to intertwine the 60,000 words of Le Petit Robert dictionary into that landscape and create a space to celebrate the French language while providing freedom for slowness, contemplation and absorption? How to create the depth, layers, spaces and media through which the visitor could dialogue with the language, Olmsted’s park, the forest and the city? In building a project, I, as a designer, ask myself a plethora of questions. Layering the questions, one atop the other, is my design process. My proposition for Le Parc de la langue française is therefore multilayered: beacons within the landscape; a map one could keep and follow while in the park; a circular glass pavilion, 75 m in diameter where one could sit and read the full 292 m of a table on which the 60,000 words from Le Petit Robert are printed. \n\tThis thesis also reflects on what builds a community around a project, how this community becomes involved in it, adopts it, builds it and nurtures it through time. In the hopes of engaging such a community, this thesis has become an exhibition. \n\tWhile writing my thesis, I reflected on how a design project is made and, beyond the project, how a designer is built. Examining the different layers of my persona – graphic designer, architect and now professor at UQAM – I explored the palimpsest that I am through the influences my teachers, mentors, friends and colleagues have had on me. Both cathartic and optimistic, this essay is testimony to what it means to be a designer and what it means to build designers.
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 | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
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".