Out in the Wild: Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Lesbian National Parks and Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a performance duo, Winnipeg’s Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan have received international accolades for Lesbian National Parks and Services , a multifarious, multi-year performance piece begun in 1997. “In full uniform as Lesbian Rangers,” they travel to various locales such as festivals and parks to “challenge the general public’s ideas of tourism, recreation, and the ‘natural environment.’” While in Banff, Alberta, the duo created a map of the townsite with fictional heritage landmarks to assert a queer presence through humour, satire and play. Dempsey and Millan also create installations, publications and videos, including several components of Lesbian National Parks and Services, such as their 2002 PSAs, Endangered Species , featuring lesbians in decline. In 2018, the Rangers participated in an exhibition by Young Joon Kwak at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity entitled The Cave . In an interview with both artists in the fall of 2023 over Zoom, we discussed Canada’s national parks as contested landscapes through the lens of queer ecologies, homosexuality, nature, and visibility while also featuring the evolution of their collaborative performance practice as Lesbian Rangers, and thirty-eight years creating a range of other live, video, and book works.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
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".