The Mirror Staged: Images of Babies in Baby Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This talk focuses on the many "baby books" currently available that consist of pictures of babies, and considers how these pictures might represent replications or restagings of Jacques Lacan's mirror stage—that key moment in psychic development when a baby views its image in the mirror and understands that the image is in some sense itself, but also, a more perfect version of itself, an "ideal I" which the baby then strives to emulate. Viewed as re-stagings of the mirror stage, the images in baby books seem to offer their young viewers images of babies to identify with and see as what they ought to be themselves. As products of the marketplace, these books represent currently powerful cultural ideas about babyhood, so an exploration of them and a close look at the kinds of pictures found in them should reveal much about what they are telling their implied baby reader/viewers (and the adults who read along with them) about what it now means to be a baby, and about what is now the right kind of baby to be.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".