Hazardous Hues: Identification of Arsenic Present in a Range of Colours Found on Historic Archival Material in the Collection of Parks Canada
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since late 2019, Parks Canada has been active in the identification of hazardous materials in the collection under the care of the Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Heritage Directorate, using non-destructive XRF analysis. This method of analysis can detect elements of concern including lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. In the case of arsenic, selected case studies show that arsenic is found in more places than initially expected. This paper outlines the XRF analysis of collections materials expected to be found in library and archives, and discusses the visual identification of arsenic, based on the colour of the material. Arsenic yellows (orpiment and/or realgar) were not positively identified in this survey, nor was cobalt violet (cobalt arsenate). A copper-arsenic green, likely emerald green, was occasionally detected. In addition, both a green ink distinct from typical arsenical greens, and dark reds were shown to contain varying levels of arsenic on paper artefacts during this survey. This paper posits the use of early synthetic organic pigments as an explanation for the presence of arsenic in the artefacts under investigation. Historical research indicates that aside from the colours green and yellow, arsenic can also be found in materials in the red and mauve colour families, from arsenic used in the synthesis of aniline dyes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it