Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will consider how alternative practices of archiving the middle passage are performed in three new media works: Keith Piper's Relocating the Remains (1997), Stan Douglas' Nu?tka? (1996) and Rosângela Rennó's The Vera Cruz Dialogue (2000/2004). Keith Piper's hypertext piece archives the unrecorded/able histories of the middle passage, while Stan Douglas describes the colonial encounter between a Spanish and an English ship off the coast of Vancouver island while significantly leaving the presence of peoples on the shore silent and haunting. Finally, Rosângela Rennó documents a Portuguese ship's first encounter with indigenous people from Brazil, using the sea and the unreadability of the image as an index of the incompleteness of a European narrative of encounter. All of these works call attention to how the unconscious and the unspoken are inextricable from the historical process of recording and collecting facts, and deploy digital space as an archive of the intersection between place, the irrational, the unconscious and the historical. \n \nNew media, especially hypertext has the potential to create a new historical methodology in its ability to present image and text in fragmentary form. The privileging of the fragment resonates with an alternate reading of modernity from the perspective of colonialism and slavery: histories marked with violence, suppression and the fragmentation and dispersal of experience. I will argue that these types of archives within new media form the possibility to explore unofficial and suppressed histories of the middle passage and first contact. Part of the unconscious of modernity is formed by colonialism and the slave trade and is constantly suppressed by its official accounts; histories of the movement of bodies across the ocean must take these ambivalences into account. These works highlight how the unconscious and the unspoken are inextricable from the rationalizing impetus of modernity, and how the sea is made a marker for the excess of signification of modernity's colonial impetus. An historical project in new media highlights the temporal structure embedded within digital media. Temporality in new media, especially hypertext allows interactivity, repetition, loops. And yet in that process it contains in its constant movement from frame to frame, an amnesia in the jump between frames. There is almost a negation of temporality in hypertext's presentation of the immediate that stages an amnesia but also the awareness of something lost. This reiterates Michel de Certeau's delineation of the historical project as a fragile collection of facts, archives, and sounds in a constellation of danger. But to let the objects, the coalescences however ephemeral to exist, turns it into another type of narrative, subject to its own medium.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".