Picturing the pipeline: Mapping settler colonialism on Instagram
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
Through mainstream discourses that infuse all components of society, settler superiority is naturalized in Canada. This process occurs at the expense of Indigenous peoples who continue to be displaced from the land, which is conceptualized as a ‘resource’. Despite the seemingly static nature of settler colonialism, its hegemony is both contested and reinforced through the participatory social space of Instagram. Though it is primarily known for its aesthetic and visual communication properties, Instagram’s visuality contributes substantially to public discourse, enabling resistant and political expressions around specific issues. Using data collected from Instagram, this article maps the social life of Canada’s controversial Trans Mountain pipeline issue, as it develops under medium-specific affordances. Around the Trans Mountain pipeline issue, hashtags and imagery mutually inform one another on Instagram, connecting highly located and temporal experiences with national policies, as users performatively challenge and reinforce social relations as they exist under settler colonialism.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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