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Record W4245097128 · doi:10.52537/humanimalia.9612

Attending the Giraffe

2017· article· en· W4245097128 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueHumanimalia · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGeographies of human-animal interactions
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsForegroundingPrecarityLiminalityTributeHistoryEphemeral keyEvent (particle physics)AnthropoceneFace (sociological concept)AestheticsSociologyMedia studiesEnvironmental ethicsGender studiesEcologyArtLiteratureBiologySocial scienceArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this article I compare the story of the first contact tribute giraffe sent from Bengal to China in 1414 with the story of April, the famously web-cam pregnant giraffe of 2017. Both giraffes were transported by new technologies that brought together geographically dispersed people through a notable event. Both giraffes had to be conveyed from natural habitats into confinement, from distance into quasi-intimacy with European and global observers, from matriarchal family structure into an individual with a face that could at least hypothetically look back at its human viewer. The space between these two events has been marked by the emergence of a capitalist world order together with growing public anxiety about environmental risk. This shared precarity, commonly named the Anthropocene, is widely conceptualized as the result of human domination of and estrangement from nature. But the history of the giraffe reminds us that some people were estranged from nature, while others were defined by and exploited precisely because of their proximity to its resources. Each step of being made visible has relied on something else being made invisible. 
 The double act of foregrounding and disappearing has discursively shaped both our relations with animals and the visual aesthetics of modern culture. To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s well-known phrase, the medium is the message, and in this article, the medium is an animal. Two giraffes, two historical eras, two distinct sociopolitical and technological situations. Why giraffes, and what are they mediating?

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.843
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0090.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.090
GPT teacher head0.392
Teacher spread0.302 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it