Alley Atlas: from non-place to place in six maps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Activators and the general public view commercial alleyways as “non-places”—they seem to lack a sense of history, relationality, and identity, and therefore a sense of place (Augé, 1995). In this study, I use a phenomenological understanding of place to explore the potential place-ness of the Bishop/Mackay alleyway, a commercial backstreet in downtown Montreal. I use the same concept to map personal stories associated with this alleyway and to better understand the deeper sense of place this particular alley holds. Using a research-creation process, ethnographic methods, inductive visualisation, and deep mapping lead me to my Alley Atlas. Through it, I argue that the alley’s meaning consists of its ability to house shadow-like expressions of the human condition, and connect people and places. Because of its non-judgemental quality, this alley creates a safe haven for a myriad of taboo behaviours, like crying, having a mental breakdown, smoking, using drugs, drinking alcohol, and spray-painting. Secondly, I argue that inductive visualisation and deep mapping are compelling and complementary approaches to the visualisation of meaning in an alleyway; while the former functions as a method of extracting meaning and visualising it, the latter creates a container within which to move from superficial to deeper representations and understandings of place, housing both place and non-place qualities. Finally, I arrive at the conclusion that, while the alley’s identity depends on who is looking at it and how, viewers of my Alley Atlas might see that it is inherently a place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".