Looking Through the Lens: Changing Interpretations of Edward S. Curtis's Photographs of Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Edward S. Curtis was a professional photographer, film maker, and amateur ethnologist who set out on a journey in 1900 to document the last of the “Vanishing Indians” in the North American West. Curtis had spent around 30 years of his life fixated on capturing photographic evidence of the traditional First Nations’ way of life, but after his death in 1952, his photographs would not return to the public and academic eye until the 1970s and 1980s counterculture era. Since the late twentieth century to early twenty-first century, historians have heavily debated the authenticity of his ethnographic work in Western Canada due to his tendency to stage the settings or pose the models in his photographs and films. Through the analysis of writings by historians of the mid-1990s, Mick Gidley’s work from the late 1990s, examinations of Curtis’s work from different perspectives by Professors Pauline Wakeham and Catherine Russells, as well as journal articles from the 2000s, a distinct shift from a singular accusatory and critical view in the late twentieth century has become a relatively more-positive view with analysis by professionals from a multiplicity of disciples in the early twenty-first century.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".