Social media and whirling dervishes: Countering UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage
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
Abstract Since 2003, UNESCO has officially safeguarded intangible heritage through the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Since 2005, individual, communities and institutions including UNESCO have been uploading videos of intangible heritage on YouTube, transforming this video-hosting service into a colossal user-generated archive of heritage. YouTube is not only an archive but also a living archive of intangible heritage: collections of intangible heritage are being continuously created by users, enabling this video-hosting service to capture and store diverse practices in their lived context. Through the case study of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony of Turkey, this study argues that the participatory nature of YouTube that captures intangible heritage in its lived context has the potential to disseminate heritage narratives that counter the gendered narratives put forward by nations states through UNESCO. The methodology of this research is interdisciplinary, combining performance studies, critical heritage studies, gender studies and social media with historical and contemporary research on the Mevlevi Sema ceremony. Theoretical and historical approaches are interconnected with an ethnography of a Sufi community in Istanbul and analyses of YouTube videos.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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