#spirou4rights : a critical perspective on promoting human rights through comics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Comics have been used for propaganda or for promoting different ideas by various institutions for a while. Spirou4Rights is an exhibition made of 17 panels with many one-page strips explaining the 30 articles of the Proclamation of the Human Rights sponsored by the UN available from 2018. This is not the first time the UN decided to use comic characters to promote a political ideal, sometimes provoking a backlash (e.g. Wonder Woman controversy in 2016). Taking advantage of the fact that this exhibition would celebrate two anniversaries at the same time (the 80th anniversary for Spirou—1938, and the 70th for the Declaration–1948), the UN surprisingly chose a character which, although cute, generous and courageous, is unknown outside the Francophone and maybe Francophile worlds. After presenting the interesting process through which this exhibition came out (context, dates, people involved, reasons for the choice) and acknowledging the good will of every participant, I will show how, these posters, the comic strips and the accompanying special issue of the magazine Spirou, are somehow problematic specifically in terms of ethnic and gender representations, reproducing the mentality of the out-of-touch ‘Good Old White Boys’ Club,’ not surprising in the rather gender-conservative BD world but quite shocking in the UN world.
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.
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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".