State authority and the public sphere: Ideas on the changing role of museums as a Canadian social institution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter considers the nature of the public sphere in which museums operate, and investigates museum authority as a contested issue inherent in its simultaneous roles as voice of the state articulating identity and nationalism, and as a public space for opinion and meaning-making. It looks at how the museum’s power to determine the national narrative, and limit voices, has changed over the years in Canada. It focuses attention on Canadian federal policies that have influenced the authority of museums, in particular, theoretical implications of the current policy drive for ‘social cohesion’. It describes how Canadian museums are gradually moving away from acting for and about diverse communities, and are instead offering their expert voice as one among many. An exhibit on the Underground Railroad at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is examined to consider how museums as instruments of the state can be re-tuned as sites of public identity discourse and social inclusion. Through this exhibit, Canada’s National Historic Sites reworks its traditional approach to exhibition planning and design in order to open up the process of national identity-building and to focus instead on the social process of citizenship. A product of a collaborative process that encouraged networking among African-Canadians and openness by heritage professionals, the exhibit paved the way for both formal and substantive changes in designating and commemorating Canadian heritage sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".