Documenting the Restoration Process: The Documentaries of Sara Gómez at the Vulnerable Media Lab
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>This thesis is an applied case study wherein provisional restoration documentation tools were developed for the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen's University. These tools were developed to support the ethical digital restoration of documentaries made by Afro-Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Sara Gómez, whose original film negatives and some prints were lent to the VML by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). FIAF's Code of Ethics calls for archivists engaged in restoration to "faithfully and fully" document any technical and aesthetic choices which have been made for future archivists and researchers, and in order to guarantee reversibility. The Gómez films are the VML's first restoration project, thus this thesis suggests practices that can be added to the VML's established workflows as necessary, and help ensure accurate restoration records. Besides the ethics and practices of digital film restoration, this thesis examines Sara Gómez's complicated place in Cuban film history.</p>
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".