Understanding the labyrinth as transformative site, symbol, and technology: an arts-informed inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research project focuses on understandings drawn from existing literature on the historical, mythological, and mathematical labyrinth, the accounts of individual seekers and practitioners, and the author's personal experience from five years as labyrinth "keeper" in an urban parish church in Canada. Three personal essays document this involvement with the labyrinth from the dramatic first encounter, through intellectual quest and personal pilgrimage, to responsibility for installation and maintenance as public sacred art in a host community. The inquiry includes an extensive literature review of the historical site and the many avenues of approach to understanding the interaction between place, identity, and learning that occurs in the labyrinth. Grounded in hermeneutic aesthetics and the methods of auto-ethnography, phenomenology and arts-based research, the inquiry investigates the connection between this ancient, mathematically significant site, the experience of reflective engagement with it, and contemporary interpretations of pilgrimage conceptualised as intentional seeking in the developmental process of self. Implications for education lie both in the labyrinth's symbolic function as a public art form demarcating and validating ritual space for care of the self, and in its capacity to activate the incubation of individual and collective imagination, bring about shifts in perception, restore personal equilibrium and perspective, and access tacit knowledge and inner wisdom. The medieval designers intended that users experience the characteristic sense of integrated consciousness and heightened imaginative function, a heritage that is to be welcomed at this historical juncture. The unicursal labyrinth was first inlayed in the pavement of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres in France in 1200 CE, coincident with the flowering of the School of Chartres, where the Ars Liberales curriculum formalised dialectic inquiry, technologies of the imagination, and recursive spiritual development. Reclaimed in recent years for walking meditation, the labyrinth functions, in the context of post-structural, holistic and aesthetic education, as a site of experiential learning and a technology for guiding the imagination into transformative patterns of thought. Its image symbolizes the order-versus-confusion binary characteristic of the integrative processes of personal development.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".