Agents of Inscription: Rewriting the Monumental Landscape at Place des Montréalaises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a different constellation of urban struggles, women are the protagonists of a new form in the production of public space at the Place des Montréalaises (PDM). Combating the bronze ceiling, the PDM amends Montreal’s memory culture by “unforgetting” women in public representational space. This proposition argues for the representation of women via text-based art as the values represented via sculptural figurative elements have become obsolete. Serving as a case study, this proposition is being tested through a major piece of public urban design through the creation of a city park within a major Canadian city in front of its city hall. We are collectively witnessing the failures of a post-colonial heritage comprised of didactic and classical monuments in a contemporary world. Despite the eventual failures of the commemorative landscape, rooted in values and fixed in time, this does not preclude our collective instinct to memorialize. Rather it upholds a community’s endeavours to create a memorial landscape with the caveat that beliefs change with an acceptance that the relevancy of monuments will shift. I address two interwoven questions in this dissertation. The first examines the PDM in the orbit of social forces by re-evaluating monuments through an inclusive lens. As the PDM is being built, Montreal’s surrounding commemorative landscape is actively under reconsideration. Groups have focused their attention on three prominent statues owned by the Montreal public art program, resulting in two statues being toppled while the bronze statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrook Street is under protective wrapping following a series of aesthetic actions: buckets of green paint were poured over the statue, followed by a second incident involving more-visible red paint. In this context, what role does the PDM have in building, maintaining, and contesting the city’s commemorative landscape? The second question examines the PDM as a case study in the deployment of art-based inscription as the aesthetic strategy of gender representation designed to work toward a more accurate reflection of Montreal’s evolution. Does art-based text have the power to reconfigure representations of gender through public memory production at the PDM?
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".