Resurrecting Images from the Morgue: A Case Study of the London Free Press Collection of Photographic Negatives
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 is a case study of the ongoing transformation of the London Free Press Collection of Photographic Negatives from a physical archive to a digital one. This Collection is a typical medium-sized newspaper photographic negative morgue dating between 1938 and 1992. These morgues possess enormous value as visual evidence of the development of communities, and society in general. The London Free Press serves a market of around a million people in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The Collection’s current custodian, the University of Western Ontario Archives and Special Collections, is in the process of transforming it from a purely physical entity to a digital resource of great research potential. To place the case study in a broader context, the author reviews some of the recent literature on the topic of newspaper photograph morgues. He then delves into a detailed description of the custodial history of the Collection as well as details about current collection management issues, including metadata and digitization. The author concludes that the digitized body of tens of thousands of unique images will be more than enough to satisfy many visual researchers and could form part of a North American digital photojournalism archive of immense historical value.
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 | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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