Museum Without Walls: Immersive Digital Reconstruction and Cross-Media Curation of the Yuanmingyuan Zodiac Heads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis studies an immersive, cross-media exhibition about the Yuanmingyuan Zodiac Heads, presented in July 2025 at The Art and Media Lab, The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. The exhibition uses three media: AR Posters, a VR 360 Guided Tour, and a free-explore Unity scene. This research creation project connects this practice to Malraux’s idea of museum without walls and Menotti’s projects, to discuss contemporary, platformed versions of imaginary museums as its extension. It uses Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction to explore how aura shifts through the replicas. It argues that digital tools can extend the museum beyond the building, support audience understanding of challenging historical narratives, and create a new kind of presence through embodied viewing with a digital aura. At the same time, digital heritage faces risks: over-entertainment, authenticity questions, and platform dependence. This project suggests a practical model for curating contested heritage with accessible, public-facing tools.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".