Punishment as Sublime Edutainment: “Horrid Spectacles” at the Prison Museum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been suggested that the seeking out of aestheticized forms of crime-related pain and suffering for pleasurable consumption is a postmodern phenomenon (Lennon and Foley 2004). And yet, as Michel Foucault (1977) reminds us in his particularly gruesome discussion of the treatment of Damiens the regicide, public executions during the eighteenth century were frequently the occasion for festivals at which the enterprising sold refreshments and souvenirs. Indeed, we can trace crime and punishment as staple elements of human entertainment to much earlier historical periods: in the plays of Greek antiquity and in a variety of premodern life and death spectacles featuring the agonies of offenders against the social order. What is different about the use of crime and punishment as entertainment for contemporary audiences from earlier premodern forms is that crime and its punishment are now, comparatively speaking, largely abstract entities, the spectacle of actual suffering being largely obscured from the audience’s view.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
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".