Media Archaeology as Practice : The case of Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) is about a famous story among archivists: in 1978, 533 nitrate film reels, mostly from the 1910s, were discovered in what used to be a swimming pool in a remote city in Canada. Many of these films were thought to be completely lost, and the Dawson City Film Find remain the only surviving prints to date. This paper will expose Morrison’s work as media archaeology practice, connected to media archaeology’s main thematic thread histories of the present. Morrison explores the Dawson City story as motive for a reflection on historical and material time. Erkki Huhtamo’s topos approach will be used as the framework for the analysis of Morrison’s treatment of history; and Vivian Sobchack’s conditions for experiencing the past as “presence” will inform the analysis regarding the importance of the film materiality. Finally, Eelco Runia’s thoughts on metonymic and metaphorical devices will inform the connection between history and presence.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".