Increasing Mannequin Diversity in Museum Exhibitions to Address Social Equity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For too long, museums have used thin, white mannequins as the standard for body surrogates in dress and textile exhibitions. This article explores some of the issues surrounding this practice and the message these objects may convey. As an actionable step towards social equity, it offers an alternative called the “Forest People” that aims to address issues of diversity and inclusion in curatorial and display practices. Inspired by tree diversity, the Forest People is a solution that draws from the past to create a new version of artists’ wooden lay figures. It replicates different wood colors and grains and can lend itself to presenting a variety of different races while still fading in the background and conveying an aesthetically pleasing and visually coherent ensemble. The article reflects on the development of a prototype for the exhibition Woven Identities: Ghanaian and Guatemalan Textiles in the Face of Globalization (2023) at the University of Alberta, and its effectiveness and potential developments.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".