Book review of "Challenge for Change: activist documentary at the National Film Board of Canada" edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, Ezra Winton. Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-7735-3662-3. \n
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Extract] In 1967 the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) created an ambitious participatory media programme called Challenge for Change/ Societe Nouvelle (CFC/SN) that sought to give disenfranchised and marginalized communities of Canada a voice by giving them access to the media. Post World War II, the NFB had prided itself on its activist agenda and 1960s technological and cultural developments inspired the development of CFC/SN, with a vision that the process of filmmaking not only document social issues, but play an active role in them as well. Challenge for Change was envisioned in three streams with one stream forming a platform whereby non-media professionals in Canada could make films about their own concerns and problems (1), with NFB support. This was a process that John Grierson observes as the shift from films made about people to films made with people.(2) For directors such as Colin Low and others involved, the Challenge for Change studio represented a return to the Grierson philosophy of government-sponsored documentary, with a new twist – not only would the government inform the people, but the people would also inform the government, a rare example of a government funding public criticisms of itself (as George Stoney recalls when asked, "Does the government know you're making these films?" he replies – "Know! They’re paying for it" (p. 318)). Low wrote in 1972: "The means of communication – real two-way communication – must be made accessible to ordinary people for dialogue in meaningful local debate. In this way, we could generate a much more vigorous problem-solving capacity based upon local initiative and creativity." (3)
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".