Making a Mark: Displays of Regional and National Identity in the Big Things of Australia and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Big Things—oversized three-dimensional representations of everyday objects, often situated on the roadside—have received minimal academic attention to date, despite being a popular phenomenon across several countries including Australia and Canada. Sometimes dismissed as “lowbrow” or commercialised art forms, they are, in fact, landmarks that can be investigated as material evidence of the identities and values of the communities—local, regional and national—who build, maintain and visit them. This article takes a comparative approach to the 1,075 Big Things in Australia and 1,250 in Canada, revealing chronological, geographical and typological trends that highlight the capacity of these structures to represent their surrounding regions. In doing so, this article also demonstrates the value to be gained through studying Big Things as networks of meaning that evolve over time, reflecting the changing nature of their host societies.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".