Peter John Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America, Peter John Brownlee offers an elegantly written and extremely interesting study of a range of visual artefacts, including newspapers, paintings, photographs, caricatures, eye glasses, paper money and signboards, among others. Brownlee effectively weaves together a number of thematic threads to create a cohesive investigation of how people in antebellum America looked, learned to look differently and dealt with failures related to vision, both physiological and ideological. The many paths covered by Brownlee is a major strength of the book, which contributes to a number of different fields, including art history, print history and the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine will find Chapter One (Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in Vision) and Chapter Two (Vision, Eyewear, and the Art of Refraction) especially interesting, as Brownlee undertakes an extremely well-researched exploration of the burgeoning field of ophthalmology. Print historians, on the other hand, will find much of interest in Chapter Three (Broadsides, Display Types, and the Physiology of the Moving Eye) and Chapter Four (Signboards, Vision, and Commerce in the Antebellum City). Chapter Five (The Optics of Newspaper Vision) examines multiple paintings by American artist Richard Caton Woodville, as well as caricatures, photographs and paintings by other artists, and Chapter Six (Paper Money, Spectral Illusions and the Limits of Vision) offers a thorough and illuminating discussion of Francis W. Edmonds’s The Speculator (1852, Smithsonian American Art Museum). These two chapters will be of particular interest to historians of American art. Throughout the book Brownlee, a curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art, offers wonderfully insightful and thought-provoking visual analyses of paintings, graphic satire and other kinds of visual culture, such as photographs and architectural drawings.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".