Unmasking the Pandemic: From Personal Protection to Personal Expression: An exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, three curators at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) began documenting and collecting non-medical face masks from around the world. Working virtually from their homes in Toronto, Canada, they assembled over 300 masks from across 23 countries, recording stories of making, makers and cultural meaning. Their rapid response collection culminated in a year-long free exhibition, Unmasking the Pandemic: From Personal Protection to Personal Expression (September 2021–September 2022), which presented over one hundred original masks, many handmade, grouped under four themes: ‘Poetry and Protest’; ‘Heroes and Warriors’; ‘Survival and Strength’ and ‘Artistry and Innovation’. This article presents highlights of the exhibition, drawing attention to the exquisite artistry, innovative designs and powerful messaging behind the masks which reflected their makers’ stories of resilience, cultural identity and collective humanity in the face of a global crisis.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".