Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract What remains of the North American avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s? Certainly many more films than filmmakers, but a paper trail as well. Housed in museums, university libraries, film archives, and personal collections across the United States and Canada, a decentralized and ever-expanding set of documents and ephemera is shaping and informing numerous research-based projects in curation, academic scholarship, and film restoration. And yet, in contrast to this contemporary trend, the collected papers of Michael Snow at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto have yet to be explored in depth. A notable exception is Elizabeth Legge's monograph on Snow's Wavelength (1967), which cites some of the notes he kept during the film's conceptualization and production.2 Because the analysis of those notes was not one of Legge's primary objectives, however, her book reproduces only three of the pages in Snow's Wavelength file. The occasion of Snow's recent passing will doubtless be met by various forms of retrospection, and this small contribution to that extended moment of reflection makes available in print a greater number of the Wavelength files than have previously been published. They represent a rare instance of a canonical avant-garde film's being accompanied by a significant corpus of scribblings, illustrations, and diagrams. This selection, comprising twenty-four pages taken from the filmmaker's unbound notes, introduces some of the themes and questions that Snow was putting to paper during the project's year of gestation. Below, I offer a few remarks on those pages. They are admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but they are intended to bring to light some of the archive's lesser-known revelations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.079 | 0.015 |
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".