Now and Then: Situating Contemporary Photography of the Canadian West into a Shared Photographic History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract | Photography has an important place, both contemporary and historical, in shaping visions, understandings, and experiences of the Canadian West. The varied uses of early photographs of the West, circulated in a moment of national consciousness brought on by Confederation, shaped the collective Canadian imagination. Contemporary artists and scholars continue to be influenced by many of the same ideas that emerged in this early moment of Canadian history, when both country and medium developed alongside one another. Themes of exploration, identity, colonialism, settlement, tourism, natural resource, industry, and ecology find as much resonance in historical photographs in archival and museological collections as they do in contemporary photography and critical discourse. This essay bridges historical themes and archival pieces with the images of contemporary photographers working in western Canada today, whose photographs are featured in this issue. This essay sets the historical framework that endures in themes that contemporary photographers explore and also links the artists featured in this issue into a shared visual history.Résumé | La photographie a une place importante, contemporaine et historique, dans les visions de mise en forme, dans l’élaboration de visions, compréhensions, et expériences de l’Ouest canadien. Les utilisations variées des premières photographies de l’Ouest, circulé dans un moment de la conscience nationale provoquée par la Confédération, ont façonné l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Artistes contemporains sont encore influencés par un grand nombre des mêmes idées qui émergent en ce moment au début de l’histoire canadienne, à un moment que le pays et la photographie développer ensemble. Thèmes de l’exploration, l’identité, le colonialisme, le règlement, le tourisme, les ressources naturelles, l’industrie, et l’écologie sont résonnant dans les photographies historiques maintenant continues dans des collections d’archives et de musées comme dans les photographies contemporaines et l’écriture de celui-ci. Cet essai relie des thèmes historiques et œuvres d’archives avec le travail de photographes contemporains travaillant dans l’Ouest du Canada aujourd’hui, et qui est présentée dans ce journal. Cet essai se développe l’histoire qui persiste dans les thèmes que les photographes contemporains explorent dans leur travail, et servir comme un lien entre les artistes présentés dans ce journal dans une histoire visuelle commune.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".