Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Susan Sontag's final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the literary critic, political activist, and controversial theorist of photography argues that, whether photographs are understood as "naïve object[s]" or "the work of an experienced artificer," their meaning and the viewer's response to them depends on how pictures are identified or misidentified-that is, on how textual discourses are constructed through the act of individual viewing.Sontag concludes that whatever excess of understanding is suggested in a given image, a caption will eventually "be needed" to help read the image. 1 It is to this bold claim that Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites appear to respond with their collaborative work No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.This book is at once a study of iconic photographs as public art in American culture, and an unabashed rebuttal of what the authors term the "hermeneutics of suspicion" around visual culture. 2 It provides a dynamic and much-needed contribution to debates concerning the value of visual representation and its relationship to implicit tensions within liberal democracy.The book arrives on the heels of current efforts within an expanding field of visual studies to push for a full understanding of the technological and cultural (and not strictly textual) processes through which meanings are made for images.3 At its core, the study builds upon existing histories and theories of photography's emergence as a ready, duly subversive, highly mobile, and technologically superior medium, concurrent with the rise of the nation state.The authors emphasize how photography has been increasingly identified as an alternative mode of conflated artistic and documentary representation, freely disseminated to a broad, public audience.More specific to the thesis of this book, the authors isolate photojournalism as "an important technology of liberal-democratic citizenship," defined by its "intersection of liberal and democratic sensibilities" and its service to very real
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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 | 0.003 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.311 | 0.329 |
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".