Grief Ankle: on Ekphrasis as Feeling through Memory, Medium, and Meeting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis makes the case for ekphrasis – the description of the visual in language – as a three-part model for movement: from origin, accumulation, to release. The written portion consists of three ekphrastic essays to/about art objects — paintings of mothers, photographs of trans friends as children, and sculptures of unmade beds — sentimental objects, theoretical sources, and dear friends. Each chapter corresponds to each of ekphrasis’ three movements, culminating collectively to ekphrastic release. The first chapter establishes ekphrasis’ psychoanalytic origin: as ekphrasis repeats the grief of the first loss through mimesis’ recall, the memory changes, transforming into a kind of forgiveness. The second chapter builds a theory of trans materiality, in which the orientation/phenomenological “purposefulness” toward a word-object moves the self toward the self, and the word-objects accumulate as one’s life becomes one’s life. The third chapter uses the ekphrasis of accessible text/image description as a scale model for interpersonal world building, an ekphrasis which does, which tangibly imagines different intimacies and futures in our co-constructed common grounds. The project also includes a commissioned performance by the poets Sanna Wani and Elizabeth Mudenyo at Xpace Cultural Centre on March 16, 2024. More information about this performance and its relation to the written thesis can be found in Appendix A’s support paper.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".