Colonial copyright and the photographic image : Canada in the frame
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under Colonial Copyright Law, the British Museum Library acquired a substantial collection of Canadian photographs between 1895 and 1924, taken by a variety ofamateurs and professionals across Canada. Due to the agency of individual photographers, the requirements of copyright legislation and the accumulating principleof the archive, the Collection displays multiple geographies and invites variousinterpretations. Chapter 1 discusses the development of Colonial Copyright Law and its application to photographic works, examining the extent to which the collection was born of an essentially colonial geography of knowledge. The chapter outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis in relation to scholarship on colonial regulation, visual economies and Canadian historical geography. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the evolution of the Collection and provides a discussion of research strategy, focussing on how its diverse contents may inform understandings of Canada's changing landscape, cities and people. The substantive core of the thesis examines the contents and genres represented in the collection through a series of linked studies. Chapter 3 considers the photographic representation of Canadian cities, focussing on the use of the camera in Victoria and Toronto to explore the political and commercial aspects of urban change. Chapter 4 explores the interaction of the camera and the railroads, two technologies at the cutting edge of modernity, examining how photography both promoted the railway and depicted the impact of railway disasters. Chapter 5 explores the visual economy of the photographic image through the medium of the postcard, with reference to the Canadian National Exhibition and the Bishop Barker Company of aviators. Chapter 6 considers a variety of views of Native American peoples, the result of the intersection of various photographic impulses with Colonial Copyright Law. The final chapter returns to the Collection as a whole to consider its agency in the digital age.
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".