Bitumen and a Reorientation of Vision
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What new histories surface when photography begins underground? Chapter 1 turns to bitumen, the light-sensitive material in the first photograph taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. Taking as a case study Warren Cariou’s petrographs of the Athabasca tar sands in western Canada, the chapter proposes a shift in focus from light to minerals, considering the complex interplay between time, fossils, solarity, and labor that bitumen introduces. It situates Cariou’s very material photographs within the hidden-in-plain-sight visual culture of oil, reading Cariou alongside works by Ts?m?, Edward Burtynsky, and Allan Sekula. Crucially, Cariou’s petrographs move toward a land-based photography, bringing into view the complex networks of settler colonialism, petrocapitalism, and consumption that make the image possible while proposing other ways of seeing human relations with territory. In doing so, Cariou makes a case for photography as a critical site of antiextractive world-making.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".