Resisting Erasure: Photographic Archives and Black History in Canada
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 article considers the historiographical challenges brought on by dislocation and, in response, shows how longstanding Black communities in Canada have collected and preserved photographs in order to combat institutionalized modes of erasure. Specifically, it investigates the role that nineteenth century photographs play in articulating Canada as a Black transnational space—part of the discourses of the Black diaspora and Black Atlantic. The main site of this investigation is the Alvin D. McCurdy fonds at the Archives of Ontario, a collection of photographs of communities in Amherstburg, Ontario—a major terminus of the Underground Railroad. Building on recent scholarship this study investigates the discursive continuity between archive and historical narratives, and reconceptualizes the "archive" to include alternative sites and materials for the reconstruction of historically marginalized groups. These "counterarchives" can perform a recuperative role in mapping the development of communal memory and in reinterpreting dominant narratives. This article explores how photographic archives can provide crucial visual documentation of the geographies of slavery, segregation, and dispossession, spatializing acts of resistance within the Canadian landscape (McKittrick 2013).
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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