“The Sense of Nearness”: Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands and the Materials and Bodies of Nineteenth-Century Life Casting
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1853, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning sat for a plaster life cast of their intertwined right hands. Previous accounts of this sculpture have interpreted it as a sentimental testament to the poets’ famous romance, neglecting the complexity of the casting process. This article looks anew at Hosmer’s Clasped Hands by combining close examination of the plaster and bronze versions with historical records of life casting and recent theoretical approaches to the body. This analysis draws attention to the multifaceted negotiations among artistic materials and human hands that conspired to produce this sculpture. In doing so, it troubles widely held assumptions about the indexicality of life casts, proposing instead a dynamic set of relationships better described as nearness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it