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Record W3048217899 · doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcaa019

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

2020· article· en· W3048217899 on OpenAlex
Christopher Keep

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.788
Threshold uncertainty score0.415

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

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