The representation of international states, societies, and cultures in twenty-first century space-themed exhibits: an anthropological inquiry into museums in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the inclusion and exclusion of cultural information within museum exhibitions at space and science centers, aerospace museums, planetariums, and public astronomical observatories in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Aside from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, museums with content on space exploration have received sparse academic attention and, prior to this thesis, no study has investigated the use of cultural content at space museums in these four regions. This topic is explored by amalgamating archival documents on the historical development of space museums, and through the study of exhibit labels and panels at 19 space museums, including a case study of the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. \nThe theoretical frameworks of anthropology are used to assess the ways in which space museums use exhibit panels and labels to create specific cultural narratives. To accomplish this, data mining techniques were used to quantitatively assess how and to what extent culturally affiliated terms were incorporated into museum exhibit panels and labels. In so doing, this research both quantitatively and qualitatively assesses the extent at which international cultures and histories are represented. \nIn part, this thesis is intended as a critique on the current state of space museums and their exhibitions, and provides brief samples of diverse cultural narratives that might be of interest to future exhibit designers and curators, such as pre-colonial Mayan cosmology, Germany???s role in the origins of spaceflight, and the activities of modern East Asian space programs. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the potential data mining has for museum research, finding that space-exhibits do present multicultural narratives to varying extents, but that such narratives are less common in Southern California and become increasingly abundant the further one travels north.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".