Missionizing photography : Miss Amanda Jefferson's photograph album, 1892-1898
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Missionary history is a recent topic of scholarly interest although foreign mission photographs have not been afforded the same attention. The lack of scholarship on missionary photography as a category (although arguably a subset of colonial and ethnographic photographies) means that little can be said definitively about the role of photography in overseas missions. This thesis looks at a late-nineteenth century photograph album compiled by Miss Amanda Jefferson (1860-1947)--a Canadian missionary to Western India. Jefferson's album serves as a case study in unpacking the meaning of photographs generated by foreign missionaries. As her 1892 letter indicates, Jefferson intended to send the album home to her friends and Christian community in New York so they could see something of the mission field and her new surroundings. Through an analysis of Jefferson's selection, organization and captioning of the album's fifty-one photographs, this thesis examines the use of photography for this single woman missionary: how photography itself was missionized and used as a tool for visualizing the harsh realities and everyday experiences of mission work, the missionaries's goals and biases, and the contradictions and ambiguities of this kind of cultural imperialism. This thesis considers both the pubic and private functions of this album as well as Jefferson's desire for the album to speak for itself despite the cultural and physical distance that divided the viewers from Jefferson and the people and places pictured.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".