Point in time: significance of needlepoint to community, culture, and entrepreneurship in the Greater Toronto area
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis centres the maker and their craft within the bounds of needlepoint. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the summer of 2024 at both Needle Art and Needle and Thread Finishing, two businesses that cater to needlepoint in the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis analyzes the complex and overlapping relationships between thread, canvas, designer, stitcher, and finisher throughout a needlepoint project. I analyze needlepoint in relation to other needle crafts and discuss new businesses and approaches to needlepoint that have emerged in recent years, including its presence on social media and online communities. I shed light on the socioeconomic boundaries that exist within needlepoint, and I examine value-based judgments on art versus craft. I take a look at Needle Art's inventory, specifically their large Judaica collection, which includes needlepointed Judaica objects that mark Jewish life cycle rituals and rites of passage. This thesis includes two needlepoint case studies; one centred on my own learning to needlepoint, the other a needlepointed challah cover. Finally, I reflect on how my views of needlepoint have changed during the authoring of this thesis and through my study of folklore and material culture.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".