Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture before and after Braille
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engagement with the life and works of Maria Theresia Paradis has experienced something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century.From the digitization of archival sources connected to her international career, to multiple works of fiction speculating on the events of her life, to new understandings of her involvement in education for (and by) the blind in the early nineteenth century, multiple forms of scholarly research and creative practice have sought to reclaim Paradis's place in history.The hybrid symposium 'Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture before and after Braille' , held in person at Mount Holyoke College and online in November 2024, sought to bring together numerous strands of Paradis's music, life, influence and posthumous reception.'Reframing the Gaze' featured two keynote talks, ten conference presentations, a film screening of the Paradis biopic Licht (Light; also distributed as Mademoiselle Paradis) together with an interview/conversation with the film's director and screenwriter, a lecture-recital, two concerts and a curated exhibition.In keeping with the symposium's broader themes, the coorganizers -Adeline Mueller (Mount Holyoke College), Christopher Parton (Princeton University) and Annette Richards (Cornell University) -prioritized accessibility in the broadest sense of the term, making possible full participation in the conference regardless of one's physical location, and ensuring that technology, visual description and access support were available, affording equitable participation for all attendees and presenters.Every event (with the exception of the film screening) was made available to both online and in-person participants via Zoom and/or the conference website, and audio descriptions by Siggy Ehrlich (undergraduate research assistant, Mount Holyoke College) were also available for the exhibition's visual and material components.The organizing committee is currently in the process of developing the symposium's website (https://sites.google.com/ mtholyoke.edu/paradis)into a permanent educational resource on Paradis's life, works and cultural milieu.The focus on accessibility in a conference about a blind woman musician speaks to the organizers' awareness that this was not merely a conference about Paradis and her historical contexts, but also an opportunity to reclaim the history of disability and the perspectives of people with disabilities.Rather than being relegated to abstract discussion or theorizing, both the systemic barriers Paradis faced and the technological and pedagogical tools she collaboratively utilized and invented to sustain her career were readily foregrounded.Many of the presenters, including keynote speakers Selina Mills (journalist and co-librettist for the opera The Paradis Files, London) and Stefan Sunandan Honisch (University of British Columbia), spoke to personal experiences of ableist assumptions in professional
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".