Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urgent Archives:A How-to-Guide1 Ted Kerr (bio) What does it mean to be the one who remembers? How can physical objects from the past help us survive and thrive in the present? What becomes possible when we come together and share our stories? At a recent public event entitled Urgent Archives, activist and scholar Zoë Dodd, curator and media maker Anu Radha Verma, and I, a writer and AIDS community organizer, wrestled with these questions and more with a live audience. We shared objects from our personal archives related to our work within the overdose response, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) queer world making, and HIV/AIDS movements, respectively. It was an opportunity for us, along with everyone in the room, to think about what we mean when we say archives, and how what we hold, save, and carry relates to the past, present, and future of our movements. In the weeks following the event, I found myself immersed in scholar Marika Cifor´s book Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS. It is an engrossing—and helpful—read that enabled me to put what just happened into a context of activism, culture, and archival work. Cifor´s book, like many others that have been published recently at the intersection of AIDS, history, and cultural production, not only helps us see the past through a different light, but can be used to make sense of the present and future. The book acts as a kind of refraction agent, enabling us to see action, cause, effect, and possibility out of the tyranny of linear time and instead through common cause, solidarity across the alive/dead divide, and beyond our fears of isolation or powerlessness. Recent books that I think also make this possible are many, including: Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles by Eric C. Wat (2022), and Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence by Darius [End Page 205] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Image of Mobile van for WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER (2022). Artwork by Les Harper, kisâkihitin. Image courtesy Blackwood Gallery. Bost (2018), as well as a book I co-wrote with Alexandra Juhasz (2022), We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production. With this book-rooted notion of refraction as pedagogy in mind, below I use the experience from the Urgent Archives event and lessons from Cifor´s book to share five key considerations for people to consider how archives work in their community and/or host their own community archive event. As part of that process, I start each section by stating the main ideological take-away, followed by a short series of questions that I hope are helpful in reading, thinking, and planning—either as an individual actor, or working and plotting with others! But, before that, I share some context for the Urgent Archives event, which also begins with a few questions. CONTEXT: WISH YOU WERE HERE/WISH HERE WAS BETTER What role can culture play within the process of collective mourning? Can an artwork be a memorial and an archive? Urgent Archives was part of WISH YOU WERE HERE/WISH HERE WAS BETTER (WYWH/WHWB), a mobile event series for public gathering, mourning, and education that myself, Dodd, and fellow organizers Ellyn Walker and [End Page 206] Les Harper created with the Blackwood Gallery team at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. At the heart of the project was a dream that Walker had in which she envisioned bringing together a few artists and thinkers whose work she admired in a van to travel and make connections in communities along the way. Art, stories, and healing could be shared, specifically as they related to the twin pandemics of overdose deaths and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). As the then acting director of Blackwood, she worked with Karie Liao, Assistant Curator, Fraser McCallum, Project Coordinator, Jacqui Usiskin, Curatorial Assistant/Collections Archivist, along with Aidan Cowling, Exhibition Coordinator and Lea Rose Sebastianis, Curatorial and Research Assistant to make it happen. Every day for a week in early...
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
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".