The Performance of Canadian History: The Work of Historical Interpreters, Animators, and Re-Enactors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This dissertation argues that living history is, in fact, a theatrical genre despite its practitioners’ insistence that it is not, and that this theatricality is a direct result of its originating from a well-funded, deeply-researched government program. Although there have been several significant studies about Canadian living history in the last thirty years, scholarship on living history is mostly American; therefore, I start with an assessment of the genesis, nomenclature, and literature of living history to clarify that both a theatrical and, critically, a Canadian perspective is missing from the field. Next, I analyze the uniquely Canadian living history tropes that arose from the development of the Louisbourg Method in the 1960s and use a scenographic and dramaturgical evaluation to codify the method’s innate theatricality. I further develop my theatrical assessment by discussing the paradoxical anti-theatricality of recreational re-enactors. Their rejection of theatricality not only robs them of a useful tool for telling historical stories, but also unintentionally re-enforces some of the more harmful aspects of re-enactment (war games for old white men) by rejecting creative ways to include non-canonical bodies and histories. Finally, I consider the uneasy alliance between living history and its various stakeholders in a discussion about the precarious position in which living history in Canada currently finds itself. Aspects of this problem include: untangling conflicting objectives arising from having multiple historical authorities at one site, co-opting living history methods to sell non-historical commodities, and reliance on commercialism to generate income. I conclude that the positive implications of living history performances are undone when the support of research and development, an original tenet of the Louisbourg Method, disappears. The lack of resources has led to a greater reliance on mismatched sponsorships and non-historical but crowd-pleasing activities which dilute or even threaten the performance and reception of Canadian history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.083 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".