COSTANZA CARAFFA, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This collection of papers challenges archivists and art historians to re-examine the use of photographic sources for the study of art history, and brings to the foreground the role of photography as a mediator in art history.While the title of the book will interpellate photo archivists, art historians, and visual resource librarians, the extensive analyses, case studies, and theoretical discussions could provoke parallel examinations in other fields of study that rely heavily on photographs -or even other types of records.The approach taken might also contribute to examinations of the interrelationship between media and discipline in ethnography, musicology, architectural history, and film studies.Be they field notes, audio recordings, photographs, or DVDs, what are the impacts of recordings or study surrogates on the disciplines that use them?For archivists, the readings in this book should lead to new considerations for archival appraisal, scholarly access, and digitization initiatives.The editor, Costanza Caraffa, is the head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florenz -Max-Planck-Institut.In 2009, her institution and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London organized two conferences titled Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History; this volume is a compilation of the papers from these events.Twenty-nine authors, including art historians, photographic historians, museologists, and curators, have contributed.They are based at universities and collecting institutions in Europe and North America.Caraffa has grouped the papers into four sections: "On Photo Archives"; "Collecting Photographs, Shaping Art History"; "We Make Our Photo Archives and Our Photo Archives Make Us"; and "In a Photo Archive."In her introductory essay, Caraffa makes numerous references to the influence of Canadians Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz.Acknowledging Schwartz's contributions to critical thinking in photographic archives, Caraffa's title for the third section, "We Make Our Photo Archives and Our Photo Archives Make Us," is a deliberate play on the title Schwartz chose for her seminal article "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics." 1 A succinct quote from Donald Preziosi launches the introductory essay: "Art history as we know it today is the child of photography" 2 (p.11).As the papers and the sections roll out, we follow the development of photographic processes in the mid nineteenth century and their impact on the emerging discipline of 1 Joan M. Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.005 |
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".