Bibliographic record
Abstract
The circus might not at first glance appear to have much to do with either theatre or history. It mainly shows actual physical feats, not theatrical make-believe, story-telling or play-acting. It seems to inhabit a time of its own, separate from the course of events, ever the stuff of family outings and childhood nostalgia. Hasn’t the circus always been there? Even in the wake of the animal-free New Circus movement of the 1990s, and the advent of stylishly choreographed and expensive metropolitan shows such as the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, the great majority of the world’s circuses still peddle candy-floss and clowns, parping horns and miniature bikes, and sometimes sorry menageries. Nell Stroud, writer, performer and director of the successful neo-Edwardian-style Gifford’s Circus in England (see Fig. 19), has authored a children’s book on circus history, but assures me that, for the most part, circus people are not very interested in the subject. An honours degree in Circus Studies has for some years now been offered by Circus Space in London, but students receive only one lecture on circus history, with the theoretical emphasis firmly on the critical analysis of performance. By contrast, in art schools, the history of art and design has long been a mainstay of the classroom and indeed serves as the benchmark for progress and modernisation in these fields. It is my view that most circuses fail to engage in a conscious dialogue with their own past and so risk becoming slaves to a dwindling repertoire of hackneyed traditions. Attempting to rectify this situation, the journalist Tony Montague is, at the time of writing, currently working on a production for another Canadian company that draws upon key episodes of early circus in North America, but feels that this is quite a solitary and pioneering task.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.628 | 0.591 |
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".