Towards a Definition of Visual Artistsâ Archives: Vera Frenkelâs Archives as a Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an exploratory case study of the archives of Canadian artist Vera Frenkel and their acquisition by Queenâs University Archives in Kingston, Ontario. The research seeks to understand, through empirical investigation, the many factors that shape the artistâs recordkeeping and archives in the personal sphere and contribute to the nature of the eventual archival fonds in the institution. The foundation for the research includes the literatures of archival studies, life narrative, and art.\n\nVera Frenkelâs interdisciplinary art work reflects a deep engagement with questions of truth and fiction. As an aspect of this theme, records and archives play a role in several of her works, often being revealed as problematic sources of evidence. Fundamental to the artistâs approach to interdisciplinarity is a complex layering of elements that builds uncertainty in the viewer. Given these aspects of Frenkelâs work, research that elicits the artistâs testimony about her archives must be able to accommodate a degree of ambiguity in the construction of that testimony.\n\nIn a series of in situ interviews with the artist in her studio, the author investigated Frenkelâs recordkeeping habits and their relationship to her creative practice. As a data source, these interviews were supplemented by the artistâs photographs and hand-drawn maps of the studio. The author also investigated the processes entailed by archival transfer, examining the extant Vera Frenkel fonds at Queenâs University Archives and interviewing Heather Home, the archivist responsible for the acquisition. Both the personal and institutional spheres were taken into consideration as essential contributors to the nature of Frenkelâs archives as a complex cultural artifact.\n\nThe research argues for the central role of archives in the acquisition and preservation of contemporary art. It contributes a foundation for understanding the nature of visual artistsâ archives.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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".