Confessions of a Red Thread Bandit Queen:\nTen Years of Fieldwork with Narrative Embroidery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I confess to living a life full of unexpected experiences trying to remove the bark from the tree of commercialism and finding the ever-fruitful world of contemporary textiles made by traditional artisans. This presentation is a series of confessions brought to light through fieldwork, teaching and working in India and Canada / there and here / two worlds made into one. We begin with the six images connected to confessions or thoughts to live by:\nAlways dream that something is possible. I confess that I can be very stubborn when it comes to realizing these dreams. When I first saw sujuni and khatwa I thought of the appliqué wall hangings of Inuit women from Baker Lake in Nunavut, Canada. Memories of childhood visits to TB hospitals in Edmonton and the wonderful dolls the Inuit women made to pass the time. And I wondered from the Santal community in India what it would be like for these women to meet those women. Through the magic of many people it happened in the very building we are standing in today. At Harbourfront Center in Toronto, the York Quay Gallery in the summer of 2004 was the exhibition “Images tell the Stories, Thread has a life of its’ own.\nDuring twenty-five years of teaching in the West, I worked with everything from the practical elements of design, textile technology to material culture history. Since ‘reinvention’ in 2002 I have endeavored to practice meaning in life by working with narrative textiles that tell a meaningful story in real time. I am interested in cloth that reflects the skill of history in the excitement of the present. This is cloth that becomes a teller of tales and a keeper of the important ideas that keep cultures alive.
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 | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".