One Stone, Three Processes: A Material Culture Study on Queenston Limestone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Named after the Queenston Quarry, Queenston Limestone is Canada’s highest calibre of building stone for its durable building properties and aesthetics. The stone has been quarried in the St. David’s and Niagara region for over two hundred years. They were used in significant buildings and infrastructure in Canada such as the Ontario Parliament Building and the Grand Trunk Railway, earning their reputation as the “Corner Stone of Upper Canada”. Using Queenston Limestone as the vehicle, this thesis challenges the idea of materials as inert objects by revealing materials’ relationships with the built environment. Three themes are investigated to establish materials as active participants in the built environment. First, materials are positioned as part of assemblages, which are interrelated with other environmental elements. Second, the thesis emphasises material agency, which is materials’ power to influence and affect their surroundings. Third, materials’ involvement with human work shows how humans transform material while the materials shape human experiences. \n \nOne Stone, Three Processes: A Material Culture Study on Queenston Limestone interacts with Queenston Limestone through three processes: documenting and drawing the extraction site, learning and experimenting with traditional crafting techniques, and designing with discarded limestone. Part One, Landscape as Culture, involves a study of the Queenston Quarry through a series of drawings, diagrams and photographs, documenting the geological forces and human activities that influenced the development of the landscape over time. Part Two, Crafting Discards, includes three material experiments that study how traditional dry-stone stacking transforms Queenston Limestone and how Queenston Limestone enables the craft’s training environment. Part Three, Translating Materials, explores the designers’ role in working with materials by resonating with the complex material landscape of Queenston Quarry and foregrounding the intricate processes of stone craft. Through these three parts, this thesis explores the value of building materials, and reflects on the designers’ methods in studying and designing with materials.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".