Bibliographic record
Abstract
G rasslands are not easy to know. Massively transformed in the short span of ten to fi fteen decades, North American grasslands challenge ecologists, who have had little time to understand their "original ecology and function." 1 Contemplated from afar, "they are almost featureless, a horizontal, double-stitched seam between earth and sky. Moving up close is equally challenging. By the time the infi nitely narrow, windblown stems and leaves come into focus, all larger perspective is lost." 2 So mused Don Gayton -a student of western Canadian landscapes whose collection of lyrical essays exploring the transformation of the prairies, titled Th e Wheatgrass Mechanism, won him a reputation as a writer with "the eye of a scientist and the soul of a poet" -as he contemplated Spirit in the Grass, a coff ee-table book on the Cariboo-Chilcotin region of British Columbia. 3 Th e photographer's challenges are real. Every "shot" encapsulates a series of decisions: which lens to use; where to direct it; when, in what light, to press the trigger. Every image is composed and framed, as a close-up, a long shot, a view of the middle distance. But are grasslands more diffi cult to encapsulate than other landscapes? Rugged snow-capped mountain peaks, the impressively broad and soaring trunks of old-growth rainforest, rugged shorelines -the classic images associated with western Canada's parks and protected areas, and beloved of tourists and camera buff s -are not typical of these areas. 4 But does the photographer out on the range really face a stark choice between uninteresting depictions of a horizontal world and myopic close-ups of ground-hugging vegetation? Although Gayton suggests as much, he praises photographer Chris Harris xii Foreword for images that focus on the "broader landscape," a sort of middle ground that is certainly not without its charms. Harris "feasts," observes Gayton in one telling phrase, "on the contrasts of the velvet-textured grasslands as they press against the jagged bareness of the cliff s"; in another similarly evocative sentence, Gayton marks the scale and grandeur of an image by noting the presence of two hikers, tiny fi gures "in the tawny, contoured grassland expanse of Churn Flats ... like two insignifi cant ticks on the broad, muscular back of some huge animal at rest." 5 Yet, Harris's pages include close-up studies of birds and butterfl ies, and stems of bunchgrass backlit by the burning orb of the sun dominate his book's arresting cover. Eff ective photographic essays -and the most reverberant coff ee-table books -usually encompass a range of scales. Th ey are grounded in detail: they depend upon their materiality, upon their capacity to make things recognizable, imaginable, real. But they cannot stay there alone. To be eff ective they must move beyond the myopic close-up and attend to wider horizons, both actual and fi gurative. Sweeping vistas and wide perspectives are essential complements to tightly focused imagery. Th ey allow viewers to "place" or fi nd larger meaning in the specifi cs.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".