Quintessential Childhood: Showing Care in the Exhibition of the Dionnes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores issues of curation pertaining to the exhibition of the Dionne Quintuplets. Born in 1934 in a small town in Ontario, the Quints were taken from their family to become wards of the province and viewed by over 3 million people in a specially constructed ‘hospital’ that served as the tourist attraction Quintland. For nine years the Quints were presented as exemplars of modern childhood. Two framing discourses will be explored: on the one hand, the presentation of ‘care’ and, on the other, the inscription of the Quints within an emergent aesthetic of ‘cuteness’. This analysis seeks to address the question of what it means to show care, as well as how the presentation of the Dionnes as ‘cute’ children attempted to distinguish their display from contemporaneous freak shows. While the curation of the girls’ within a medicalized discourse sought to present ideologically ‘correct’ bodies and images of idealized childhood, the freak show impulse to make their bodies profitable for consumption was nevertheless sustained by the state’s involvement in their display.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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; 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".