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 Queen’s University Archives in Kingston, Ontario. The research seeks to understand, through empirical investigation, the many factors that shape the artist’s 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 Frenkel’s 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 artist’s approach to interdisciplinarity is a complex layering of elements that builds uncertainty in the viewer. Given these aspects of Frenkel’s work, research that elicits the artist’s 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 Frenkel’s recordkeeping habits and their relationship to her creative practice. As a data source, these interviews were supplemented by the artist’s 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 Queen’s 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 Frenkel’s 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 artists’ archives.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".