MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W3048217899 · doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcaa019

Life on Mars?: Hélène Smith, Clairvoyance, and Occult Media

2020· article· en· W3048217899 on OpenAlexaff
Christopher Keep

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Victorian Culture · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOccultSpiritualismUncannyParanormalPsychicHollywoodMedia studiesPaintingArt historyArtPsychoanalysisSociologyAestheticsPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Turning away from the recent critical interest in spiritualism and its connections with the telegraph and wireless radio communications, this essay examines the mediumistic practices of Élise-Catherine Müller (or ‘Hélène Smith’) and the psychical faculty of clairvoyance. Smith’s capacity to project her mind to the shores of an alien world allows media scholars to consider the ways in which occult media afford alternative ways of imagining the relationships between self and other, actual and virtual, and presence and absence. In Smith’s accounts, detailed in transcripts of her séances produced by the noted Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, and in a series of startling watercolour paintings produced by the medium herself, clairvoyance appears not as the uncanny other of the electric telegraph, a means of conveying coded signals from one place to another in real time, or even as a kind of psychic television, affording the viewer an opportunity to see and hear distant scenes. It models, instead, a kind of tele-presence, a mode of being in which the self and other, no less than the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of tele-communications, are shown to be deeply imbricated in one another. In the world of occult media, the essay concludes, communication is never as simple as sending and receiving – it is a problem of being.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.032
Threshold uncertainty score0.063

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.022
Scholarly communication0.0070.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.229
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueJournal of Victorian CultureSame topicReligious Studies and Spiritual PracticesFrench-language works237,207