The Disappearance of Arthur Nestor: Parafiction, Cryptozoology, Curation
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
This paper considers Beneath the Surface: The Archives of Arthur Nestor, a parafictional exhibition that I curated in 2014 with 16 undergraduate students at Western University, Canada. The exhibition depicted the life of Dr. Arthur Nestor, a professor of Biology who had disappeared from London (ON) in 1975, seemingly without trace. Over the summer of 2014, some of Nestor’s files and artefacts had been discovered during university renovations, and this archive was given to students in Museum Studies to organize and catalogue. As we sorted through the files, it became clear that Dr. Nestor was something of a controversial figure, a man who became an environmental activist in Southwestern Ontario because of his belief that cryptids (lake monsters) lived in Lakes Huron and Erie, and were in need of protection from human-made pollution. As the documents in his file overlapped with our research in the wider sphere, the evidence seemed to suggest that Nestor had left London to join Dr. Roy Mackal, a University of Chicago professor of cryptozoology searching for the Loch Ness Monster. This paper weaves together the tale of Arthur Nestor and the curating of Beneath the Surface with a history of the relationship between natural history museums and cryptozoology, ultimately questioning what parafiction can do in both art galleries and museums.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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