Celestial Apparitions: Media-Machine, Broadcasting and Aerial Advertising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the interwar period, as commercial aviation was beginning to take shape, a range of technical innovations led to the development of the field of ‘aerial advertising’. Aerial advertising took on various media forms (sonic, visual, textual) and supports (leaflets, light projections, billboard-like print advertising, smoke, audio speakers) and turned to the sky as screen, support, milieu or medium for mass communication. This essay sets out to revisit the case of aerial advertising, mobilizing some of the key lessons and themes from Speaking into the Air. I explore the specific symbolic and technical configurations of transportation and communication put forth by aerial advertising. Then, turning to the two foundational models of dissemination and dialogue, I address the ambiguous role of pilots as speakers/writers. Finally, I use the case of aerial advertising to explore some of the negotiations around the various meanings of broadcasting and conclude on the question of the persistence of presence.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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.
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".