Spatial Histories: Geography, Memory, and Alternative Narratives of the Iranian Revolution of 1979
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In distinction from the overwhelming tendency to conceive history primarily in terms of its temporal chronologies, this paper considers the spatiality of history and historical memory. Engaging with seven Oral History interviews with diasporic Iranians in Toronto on the Iranian Revolution of 1979, we show that narratives of historical events are deeply shaped by the geographical location of narrators: those emplaced in differing geographical locations at the time of the Revolution not only remember disparate events, but also associate distinct temporal points with the Revolution. For instance, while those remembering the Revolution from the capital city of Tehran produce narratives that closely align with the official historiography of the Revolution (such as in recounting street protests and the culmination of the Revolution on February 11th, 1979), others remember events and dates that are only peripheral to official accounts (such as the arson at Cinema Rex on August 19th, 1978, or the hostage crisis that lasted from November 4th, 1979 to January 28th, 1980). In other words, both the content of memories (what narrators remember) and their temporal associations (which dates narrators recall) are informed by the embodied geography of memories. Hence, those whose geographical locations diverge from the largely capital-focused vantage point of official histographies produce narratives that diverge from these accounts. In short, geography and embodied emplacement are central to historical narrative, whether authoritative or narrated form geographical margins.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".