7 Fingers Back and Forth Across the Border: A Tale of Two Countries and Their Circus Collaborations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores some of the implicit and explicit cross-border collaborations and circulations that characterize the contemporary North American circus scene, notably focusing on Les 7 doigts de la main (7 Fingers), a collective based in Montreal made up of artists from Québec, France and America. There is a long history of cross-border circus activity between Québec and the U.S., from Rickett’s early modern circus touring Québec in the late 1700s and Ringling Brothers’ attracting Canadian talent to the U.S., to Québec exporting and imposing its artistic, acrobatics-based “new” circus through the success of Cirque du Soleil and other touring companies. This chapter concentrates on some lesser-known stories and connections bridging Montreal, San Francisco, and New York, as experienced by the 7 Fingers. Having deep roots in both Montreal and San Francisco, the collective has constantly been juggling multiple affiliations, affection, and cultural codes. The artistic directors are more than ever aware of their generative role with the next generations of North American circus performers on both sides of the border.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".