Making sense out/of the visual: Aboriginal presentations and representations in nineteenth‐century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines a series of visual representations and material objects made by Aboriginal and colonial artists for the Prince of Wales's 1860 tour. This first royal visit to Canada featured a series of carefully staged meetings with Indians wearing distinctive dress, presentations of fine, Native‐made gifts, performances and formal speeches. The tour also stimulated a wealth of pictorial representations ranging from amateur watercolours to professional lithographs commissioned for the new illustrated weeklies. The material objects and visual images survive in museums and archives as a deposit of a moment of heightened colonial encounter and contestation. I argue that they reflect both the increased power and the reductionist tendency that characterize visual representation in modernity. On the other hand, the contemporary reassembly and reframing of these materials offers the opportunity to make sense out of the visual by accessing other sensory and performative dimensions of these encounters that point beyond the limitations of the visual towards a more fully post‐colonial understanding of their expressive values.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".