From 'Somewhere in France' to Somewhere in the Collections: Recovering Soldier Art at the Canadian War Museum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Works of art and warfare have a long and deeply entwined history.This is especially true in Canada where war art has played a role in nation-building and identity formation.Official Canadian war art, commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund and the Canadian War Records during the First and Second World Wars respectively, has often been at the centre of this history, obscuring works created by individual soldiers.This dissertation discusses unofficial soldier art that has been "hidden in plain sight" in the George Metcalf Archival Collection, the Canadian War Museum's textual archives.It explores the different kinds of soldier art to be found there, including examples that adorn the pages of letters, diaries, military training course notebooks, Great War nursing sisters' autograph books, and Second World War POW wartime log books.The war stories this soldier art tells are personal, intimate, complex, and, at times, funny and heart wrenching.They offer us a glimpse into the experiences of ordinary Canadians who lived through the World Wars.This study argues that a national high culture bias, the quirks of the institutional histories of three Canadian national cultural institutions, the interests of professionalizing public and academic history fields, and especially the Canadian War Museum's archival cataloguing best practices, account for soldier art having been overlooked.The vastness and variety of soldier art that exists in the textual archives at the Canadian War Museum deserves recognition, reconsideration, and, ultimately, reclassification in the catalogue record, thereby making it visible to researchers and the general public.To do this, we must engage with soldier art as art, artefact, and historical document.The implications of this research reach farther than the Canadian War Museum's collections alone.This case study can (and should) be applied to other cultural institutions, large and small, nationally and internationally.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.004 |
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".