Decoding the sensory mixes of cultural artifacts: Harley Parker’s semio-affective indices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Canadian exhibition designer and painter Harley Parker developed a sensory museology by applying Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the sensorium and media to exhibition design. At the core of this applied theory was the idea that cultural artifacts could be decoded according to the sensory preferences of their makers and users that they bear. The designer’s goal would be to provoke in contemporary museum visitors an indirect experience of the sensory profiles of distant cultures by bringing both memory and imagination into play. In his book The Culture Box, Parker outlined the goal of restimulating the sense lives of museum visitors by orienting them to an empathic grasp of cultures different from their own. Fructuous encounters between the remote sensory orientations of makers and those of contemporary visitors would not be based on a forced attempt at verisimilitude (by facsimile) but, instead, by a correspondence or “affinity” that used techniques recalling or “re-knowing” the original sensory inter-relations, rather than specific content. This paper borrows ideas from literary criticism and Peircean semiotics to explicate Parker’s strategy for decoding cultural artifacts and to bring his insights into current discourses on sensory museology.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".