Photographs exhibited in Britain 1839-1865
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nineteenth century photographic exhibition catalogues are no less ephemeral than the photographs they commemorate. They record events that rarely ran more than a few weeks and sometimes lasted only several days. Those catalogues that have survived – and there are precious few in comparison to the number of exhibitions we know about – are often the only comprehensive record we have of individual photographers, what processes they used and what they exhibited. The database on which the publication is based took over a decade to assemble and is based on the transcribed contents of forty-six known catalogues. It details over twenty thousand individual objects and offers for the first time the most complete record of photographic activity in Britain 1839-1865. It is the photographic equivalent of the reference works of Algernon Graves which record paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution during the 19th century. \n \nFollowing my residency as a Lisette Model Fellow the database was published as an Occasional Paper by the National Gallery of Canada following a detailed review that ensured that every entry was a “faithful transcription” from the original catalogue. The publication was well received, but necessarily limited in circulation, and in 2004, following a successful application to the Arts & Humanities Research Council, was released as a website following extensive research and database design. This web-based version has proved an immensely popular research tool into the history of early 19th century photographic practice and is now widely cited as a standard reference work on the period. Scholars and curators from all disciplines and nationalities have found it invaluable in their research and cataloguing responsibilities. Providing web access to the primary source materials of photography is the long term strategic goal of the university with further websites currently under development with funding from the AHRC.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.007 |
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".