Somewhere between Currere and Ficto-currere, with my Teacher The Near-Sighted Monkey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I explore artist and teacher Lynda Barry’s practice of autobifictionalography as a kind of third practice at the intersection of currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1976/2015) and ficto-currere (McNulty, 2018, 2019). I position making autobifictionalographic comics, in which memory and imagination are intertwined, as a form of inquiry that can enable one to (re)construct the self while confronting (and even embracing) the limits of self-representation. This speculative, subversive, arts-based form of inquiry can implicate the autobiographical even as intentional gaps, traces, and inconsistencies play with notions of self-representation and generate fantastical, even monstrous, characters and situations. I explore currere and ficto-currere and situate my work in comics-based inquiry, analyzing an example from a comic of my own as I consider the limits of autobiographical inquiry. Finally, I suggest that comics rendered in reflective practice might offer alternative, expansive modes of representation that invite relationship and dialogue.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".