Beautiful Barriers: Art and Identity along a Belfast ‘Peace’ Wall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the representational implications of an ongoing project along Belfast’s main peace wall to transform the loyalist side of the barrier into an outdoor art gallery. Drawing in part on the interplay between social production and social construction (Low 2000) in the analysis of public space, the wall’s art is assessed as one means through which both elites and ordinary people inscribe meaning in the landscape. Particular attention is focused on a recently added mural, created as part of a European Union-funded initiative to promote ‘shared cultural space’, and the identity this promotes for the local population. Using ethnographic data gathered through participant observation as well as interviews with policymakers, artists, community stakeholders and residents, I suggest that while the wall’s art is not necessarily received or experienced by the Protestant community in the manner it is intended, it broadly serves as a touchstone by which narratives of conflict and communal ties are activated, and the neighbourhood’s evolving identity as an element in a new tourist-oriented economy is brought to the fore.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".