African Architecture Matters: Developing and Increasing the Visibility of African Architectural Collections in North America and Abroad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is easy to focus on collection strengths, recently the CCA has tried to articulate where our collection is lacking. This is to understand why we historically focused on certain architectural styles and geographical areas, and to identify where to shift priorities to address these imbalances. We recently received a donation of nearly 3000 volumes from an NGO with consulting projects in Africa. These materials were collected by European planners and architects active in Africa. This collection is important for our institution and has spurred new projects and lines of inquiry. We hosted a Master's Studies Program in 2017 focusing on the study of 20th c. African architecture as a means to inform 21st c. building practices on the continent. In 2019 we launched a research program on post-colonial architectural perspectives in Africa. This program was developed in consultation with expert advisors and is meant to be a way to contextualize, re-imagine, and update our institution's collection. In this presentation, we shared how we are building a more global collection, while remaining sensitive to a growing movement to keep cultural property where it was created. Crucial to our discussion is placing this material within its context of creation and in dialogue with similar collections globally. By engaging the original collectors as consultants and inviting architects and scholars to discuss these materials, we can enrich and build upon these collections. Similarly, by creating programs that encourage scholars to use these collections, we gain a more thorough understanding of these materials and make connections with our existing collections. We are adopting these strategies for the sake of enriching the context of these collections and creating a dialogue between our collections and community, both within our walls and globally. Presented as part of the panel "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Increasing Access to a Wider Range of Diverse Materials."
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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 | 0.019 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 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".