“A Ruin, More or Less, or a Place of Dark Nostalgia”: Prison Tourism and the Mobilization of Dark Heritage at Kingston Penitentiary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through case studies of the St. Lawrence Parks Commission’s Kingston Pen Tours and other prison-themed heritage and art exhibitions, this research project examines the phenomenon of “dark tourism,” defined as the act of travel to places associated with death and suffering. This project analyzes the ways that Kingston’s penitentiary history exists at the intersection of dark heritage tourism, place branding, and cultural diplomacy and how Kingston’s penitentiary heritage has been utilized through tourism and exhibitions to enhance, rather than undermine, the region’s image and attractiveness through the accumulation of “meta-soft power.” By considering which (and whose) stories are privileged in local prison heritage curation and promotion and why, this research questions how the City of Kingston and its local stakeholders have managed and controlled the region’s dark heritage as “Canada’s Penitentiary Capital” and mobilized it to promote local tourism and serve political agendas. This project also examines the ways that “unofficial” or counter-hegemonic representations of penal heritage in contemporary art exhibitions create opportunities for greater honesty, nuance, and critique in the narratives that are disseminated. These narratives challenge how the public thinks about incarceration and those who are incarcerated and possess the potential to spark social and institutional change. Finally, this research calls for greater inclusion, consultation, and collaboration with incarcerated communities and other groups affected by the justice system at penal heritage sites, such as the Kingston Pen Tours. In so doing, these sites would better realize their potential as “contact zones,” spaces of collaboration, consultation, and contestation between and amongst different cultures. Ultimately, this project recommends the adoption of an agonistic curatorial approach in the Kingston Pen Tours and other penal heritage sites.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".