Drawing the lines: Gender, *class, race and nation in Canadian editorial cartoons, 1840–1926
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Editorial cartooning arrived in Canada shortly after the appearance of Britain's Punch in the 1840s, and has remained a mainstay of print journalism ever since. Different from other forms of cartooning by virtue of its essential task of praising or (more often) blaming figures in the public eye, these cartoons provide insight not only into the minutiae of Canadian history, but also into the graphic terms by which the artists created their moral valuations. This study explores the principal visual codes that informed editorial cartooning in Canada from its inception until 1926, when it achieved a recognizably modern form. That development is traced through a close examination of thousands of cartoons from each of five major evolutionary periods, as the art evolved and expanded from a handful of ephemeral, specialty journals to the front page of most urban dailies from coast to coast. The analysis focuses particularly on how these graphic codes of shaming were applied to representations of gender, race, and class relations, and the manner in which those visual narratives may have impacted Canada's self-imagining as it wended its way from colony to nation. The study confirms that not only was there such a 'deep code' of graphic representation in circulation, but that it was both rooted in real cultural practices and served to reinforce those practices and the world view upon which they were based. Insofar as these historical techniques of graphic shaming continue to inform editorial cartooning today, they are far from being an ephemeral historical oddity. Rather, they lie at the heart of, and provide critical political insight into, the mechanisms by which graphic artists continue to propose certain people or groups as being better or worse than some unspecified, but always implied, ideal Canadian. From this perspective, editorial cartooning is revealed as a potent agent of the dominant group's cultural hegemony rather than the free expression of popular opinion, as it is usually considered.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".