03-09-2025, 10:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-09-2025, 10:05 PM by RenegadeHealer.
Edit Reason: forgot a word
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Wow quimqu, this is fascinating work. If you publish this formally, I would also include not only your analysis of Torsten Timm’s auto-generated VMS substitute, but also a control group using meaningful text of a comparable length. A novel involving 3+ story arcs which alternate by chapter might be a good choice. A stream-of-consciousness novel like William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury would be an interesting specimen. I’m sure your bots could easily distinguish which story arc, or which period in time in the main character’s mind, a page or paragraph belonged to.
This a similar technology used by companies like TurnItIn.com, for detecting plagiarism in academic essays, no? I remember reading that bots like these are vindicating long-held suspicions that parts of ancient works are later insertions by other authors, and confirming just common pseudo-attribution was in the olden days. Simply put, textual analysis is getting good at determining, with a high degree of confidence, which pieces of writing were, and were not, composed by the same author. This has some privacy-eroding implications that scare me a bit. I can use a VPN and the Tor browser every time I blog about something seditious or controversial, but that’ll be little help to me in a world where the prosecution can call an expert witness like you with a bot like yours to testify, and the bot says the problematic writings have a 95% confidence match with things written in my name.
I digress. Textual analysis and computer language modeling are not my area of expertise. But as a word and language nerd, they fascinate me to no end.
quimqu, have you looked into any of the efforts to restore the original order of the VMS folios? Wladimir would be your man here to talk to abut this, along with the great Koen G, of course. It’s well-established that the VMS has been taken apart and rebound at least once, by people who clearly could not read it. For example, there are at least two bifolios of Herbal B misbound into the first 7 quires, which are otherwise all Herbal A. I’d be interested to see your experiment rerun, with the extant folios in the best estimate available for their original order.
This a similar technology used by companies like TurnItIn.com, for detecting plagiarism in academic essays, no? I remember reading that bots like these are vindicating long-held suspicions that parts of ancient works are later insertions by other authors, and confirming just common pseudo-attribution was in the olden days. Simply put, textual analysis is getting good at determining, with a high degree of confidence, which pieces of writing were, and were not, composed by the same author. This has some privacy-eroding implications that scare me a bit. I can use a VPN and the Tor browser every time I blog about something seditious or controversial, but that’ll be little help to me in a world where the prosecution can call an expert witness like you with a bot like yours to testify, and the bot says the problematic writings have a 95% confidence match with things written in my name.
I digress. Textual analysis and computer language modeling are not my area of expertise. But as a word and language nerd, they fascinate me to no end.
quimqu, have you looked into any of the efforts to restore the original order of the VMS folios? Wladimir would be your man here to talk to abut this, along with the great Koen G, of course. It’s well-established that the VMS has been taken apart and rebound at least once, by people who clearly could not read it. For example, there are at least two bifolios of Herbal B misbound into the first 7 quires, which are otherwise all Herbal A. I’d be interested to see your experiment rerun, with the extant folios in the best estimate available for their original order.
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