Reading the Political Culture of Arab League States through Maps on Postage Stamps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Visualizing political culture is a major objective of states. These efforts include, for example, organizing holiday events, constructing monuments and issuing postage stamps. Stamps are visual products that are designed to inform the observer about the state’s place in a regional and global context historically and today. Maps play an important role in these visual efforts. We examine the map stamps issued by the 22 Arab League members, looking at total numbers, topics and themes. Almost 1 100 map stamps have been issued, most since 1960. The leaders in numbers issued range from 75+ each for Iraq, Egypt, Djibouti, Libya and Syria to <30 each for Kuwait, Sudan, UAE, Somalia, Lebanon and Yemen. Map themes also vary by country. Some mostly issued stamps with national themes; others were more international (Mauritania, Morocco, Tanzania and Tunisia). Some issued stamps with maps of Palestine (Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Syria), the Deir Yassin massacre (Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), regional themes such as explorers (Djibouti), popes (Tunisia), COVID-19 (Oman), a Japanese exposition (Comoros Islands), and the U.S. bicentennial (Morocco). Subsequent research could focus on the designers and producers of stamps, or changes in topics or regions over the past 40 years.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".