Historical Thinking and Visual Literacy: Exploring the Canadian War Museum with Graphic History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates how graphic history, a visual process which uses different artistic styles, illustrated narratives and comic-page sequential drawing, can contribute to our study and understanding of the past. I examine the theories and practices that underpin this visual approach to scholarship and overview how some academic historians are beginning to embrace graphic histories when conducting historical inquiry, analysis and interpretation. I also address important critiques about the academic rigour, pedagogical value and intellectual foundation of graphic history. I conclude with a graphic article to show how drawing, perspective and artistic techniques can be used to unpack historical concepts and relate historical narratives. This work is supported by SSHRC postdoctoral funding hosted by the Canadian War Museum.\nRésumé: Cet article examine comment la bande dessinée historique peut contribuer à notre étude et à notre compréhension du passé. Ce sous-genre du 9e art fait appel à divers styles artistiques qui combinent récits illustrés et images séquentielles. Je débute par une analyse des théories et des pratiques qui sous-tendent cette approche visuelle de la recherche, accompagnée d’un aperçu de la façon dont certains historiens universitaires commencent à inclure les bandes dessinées historiques dans leurs recherches, analyses et interprétations historiques. J’aborde ensuite les remises en question légitimes qui portent sur la rigueur académique, la valeur pédagogique et le fondement intellectuel de la bande dessinée historique. Je termine en incluant un article illustré afin de démontrer comment le dessin, la perspective et les techniques artistiques peuvent être utilisés pour vulgariser les concepts historiques et rassembler les récits historiques. Cet article s’appuie sur des recherches financées par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines et hébergées par le Musée canadien de la guerre.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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 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".