The ethnographic B movie: Centering the uncertain, absurd and low quality in collaborative filmmaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses an experimental modality of ethnographic filmmaking that my interlocutor/collaborator and I came to call the ‘ethnographic B movie’. I explore what I mean by the term and describe its use as novel approach to collaborative multimodal research. I argue that this approach – which encourages unprofessionalism, low quality, absurdity and caprice – provides an opportunity to centre research contexts, ontologies and epistemologies on the fringes or margins of conventional anthropological content, thought and context. Through situating the approach within ideas of arts-based research or research-creation the ethnographic B movie becomes a way to take the process of filmmaking as ethnography for the sake of an open and co-imaginative world. In the ethnographic B movie as filmic approach and representational frame, communicable meaning and narrative coherence are substituted for the spirit of co-creation, and interlocutor-driven content.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".