Mapping the Invisible City: Revealing the Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension through Narrative Cartography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urban heritage includes tangible features such as buildings and infrastructure as well as the intangible: the feelings, memories, and stories associated with places that can be considered the soul of the city. In this research, I aim to reveal this intangible heritage by mapping the constellation of stories and memories that contribute to the production of places. To do so, I studied one neighborhood in Montreal: Parc-Extension, a multi-cultural low-income neighborhood that is facing a serious loss of its intangible heritage due to a rapid gentrification process. To better understand what intangible heritage means in Parc-Extension, I engaged with local community groups, I walked in the area following auto-ethnography practices, and I conducted 19 oral history interviews with former and current residents of the neighborhood focusing on their memories and stories about this place. I then mapped these interviews with an online narrative cartography tool, Atlascine, specifically designed to combine the visual and navigational power of maps with the emotional and personal dimensions of stories. The Atlas of Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension provides access to these stories, to the places and events of importance, and to the memories associated with them. Through this process, I was able to look more closely at some of the characteristics of intangible heritage in Parc-Extension. First, this research demonstrates that intangible heritage is a dynamic notion that keeps evolving over time with residents and with their experiences and memories. It is not only about romanticizing the past but also about its connection with present-day issues, including gentrification and displacement. Secondly, intangible heritage is often deeply intertwined with tangible places such as schools, parks, buildings, and houses that remain spatio-temporal anchors to these stories and memories. Thirdly, the importance of memories, stories, and the places associated with them vary between individuals and across socio-demographic groups. Therefore, to approach intangible heritage in a meaningful way, we need to constantly engage with personal and collective stories told by those whose voices are rarely heard. This involves opening a space for these stories to be shared, listened to, and made accessible. This is what has been done in this research, which ends with an audio walk. This guided tour curates the past and present stories of the residents of Parc-Extension while inviting its listeners to walk and experience the neighborhood. It emphasizes the importance of being physically present in a place to grasp some of its intangible heritage.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".