The Struggle behind “Struggle and Story”: A Canada 150 Exhibition at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Curating a library exhibition, especially one marking an historic event like the sesquicentennial of Canadian Confederation, is much more than simply mounting a show. In many ways, it is the equivalent of writing an essay, although in physical form. The curator initially assembles items — manuscripts, printed books, and images — that provide the raw material for an argument. Out of that initial foraging and research, a theme emerges. The conversation that then takes place between “text” and initial ideas eventually leads to a tension of sorts, since the items selected both support and challenge the curator’s preconceived notions. As the process evolves, a thesis emerges which provides the unifying point around which the exhibition revolves. As a result, it is meant to offer an experience with which the viewer is invited to interact, agree, or disagree. The exhibition mounted at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in 2017, “Struggle and Story: Canada in Print,” had its origins in the curator’s romantic memories of Canada’s Centennial of 1967. While collecting material from the current collections, however, it rapidly became clear that telling the story of Canada through print could not have the same patriotic slant that had been a prominent feature of the celebrations fifty years ago. Among other things, it was the absence of items, crucial to telling that story, which would largely shape the exhibition. The silent voices of the Indigenous people, women, and minority groups that struggled to be heard over the traditional narrative altered the ways in which the displays came to be organized. The final result was very different from the original concept. In the end, mounting such an exhibition becomes a form of historical bibliography, inasmuch as it has to account for the ways in which our ancestors had chosen which stories would be preserved and which would be omitted, which would be collected, and which would not be deemed important in the library’s holdings. An exercise such as this one may highlight the lacunae in a library’s collection development policy, but it can also point the way towards expanding the institutional mandate to include the stories of those that previous generations may have disregarded.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.002 |
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".