Alternative News and Views on the Canadian Cable Airwaves: Queer Reimaginings of Television in the 1970s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Around the same time that the feminist and LGBTQ2+ movements were becoming visible in Canada, public access emerged in the early 1970s in the aftermath of social and technological changes and took the form of mandatory commitment on the part of the cable companies to provide equipment, training, and transmission for “citizen-produced programming” (Goldberg 1991, 10). Feminist and queer activists subsequently took to the medium of public access, creating shows which exemplified a type of information and connective activism (McKinney 2020; Renzi 2020) as they “[brought] together people, their visions of justice…and provide[d] access to information” (McKinney 2020, 2). This paper will revisit early queer public access shows which aired in the 1970s in Canada, such Toronto-based show Gay News and Views. Specifically, this paper will argue that public access television in the 1970s was intimately linked to activist circles, who were emboldened by community cable’s potential to solve a variety of social, political, and economic problems (Streeter 1997). Activists were not only committed to amplifying and transmitting visions of feminist, gay, and lesbian liberation on the Canadian airwaves, but also reimagined the medium of television as an “electronic soapbox” which would constitute the “ideal vehicle of communication for a truly pluralistic, participatory society” (Linder 1999, xxvii). While these optimistic views of cable access allowed various groups to have a platform to communicate about political projects in various Canadian provinces, this paper will also interrogate the emancipatory potential of community cable in Canada’s specific media context and analyze the limits which structured the possibility to (re)imagine queer television programs in the country. Works Cited Goldberg, Kim. The Barefoot Channel: Community Television as a Tool for Social Change. New Star Book, 1991. McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Duke UP, 2020. Linder, Laura R. Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Praeger, 1999. Renzi, Alessandra. Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota P, 2020. Streeter, Thomas. “Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Television.” The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, edited by Michael Curtain and Lynn Spigel. Routledge, 1997, pp. 221–243.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".