A Commentary on Patrizia Gentileâs âResisted Access? National Security, the Access to Information Act, and Queer(ing) Archivesâ
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Fall 2009 issue of Archivaria included an article by Dr. Patrizia Gentile, entitled "Resisted Access?National Security, the Access to Information Act, and Queer(ing) Archives," in which Dr. Gentile examines the Access to Information Act in the light of her own archival research into gay history.In doing so, Dr. Gentile suggests that the exemptions from release found in the Access to Information Act may be used to unfairly impede research, effect ively preventing a full and thorough understanding of the security service's past and possibly even future treatment of gay and lesbian Canadians.Since Dr. Gentile's article makes frequent reference to her research, which was carried out in the mid-to late-1990s at the then-National Archives of Canada, and she states "[a]n analysis … illuminates how the Act, LAC, and ATIP officers themselves played a critical role in the researching and writing …" of her book (p.146), in the spirit of full disclosure I must state that in the time in question I was employed by the National Archives as an ATIP (Access to Information and Privacy) officer, and that while I do not believe I ever met with her, I do remember her name and believe that it is possible that I worked on some of her requests to access archival records.In addition, she also cited an article of mine from Archivaria, dealing with the application of the Access to Information Act at the National Archives.In my own article I conceded that the legislation was imperfect and that its application to archival records could, at times, be difficult, and were that Dr. Gentile's position, there would be little reason to comment on this paper, except to say that yes, I agree.Unfortunately, in her discourse she raises a red flag of warning, seeming to imply that the legislation poses particular problems for researchers into queer history, problems which she has based at least in part upon a misunderstanding of the application of the Access to Information Act.On page 147, in describing section 13 of the Access to Information Act, Dr. Gentile states that "[a]s one of the sections quoted by ATIP officers when restricting our access to documents … this exemption marked queers as both ARCHIVARIA 69 ( Spring 2010): 1-4 A Ar rc ch hi iv va ar ri ia a, T , Th he J e Jo ou ur rn na al o l of t f th he A e As ss so oc ci ia at ti ion o on of C f Ca an na ad di ia an A n Ar rc ch hi iv vi is st ts -A s -Al ll r l ri ig gh ht ts r s re es se er rv ve ed d
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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 | 0.011 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.052 | 0.070 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
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".