Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for coming. This is very special.
It's not the first time I've introduced a lecture, but I'm introducing it. The first what we think is a new cycle of a lectures.
So that's a very special moment for the Voltaire Foundation.
We've had for 25 years or more. We've had an annual lecture called The Best one lecture that I know wrong with all us here.
But, um, where we invite enlightenment historians and literary critics to come and give a talk.
But in recent years, for lots of reasons that we know about, the Voltaire Foundation has been moving more and more towards digital research.
Um, when I first became director, we, I was given to, to sell on my first day in the office, a CD-Rom.
That's a bit historic, isn't it? And then we produced a database in the early 2000s, the electronic enlightenment.
Now we're working on digitising from scratch in a since the 201 volumes of the complete works of old.
So there's always been although we've been primarily a paper publisher until recently, we've always been doing digital research.
And over the last few years, particularly working with Glenn, the digital research has become terribly important.
As we've accumulated more data, there's been more opportunities and more excitement in exploiting that data and thinking about how to use it.
So it seemed in the in the evolution of the Voltaire Foundation, this is a good moment for us to sort of make the point by having an annual lecture.
And, um, last year we launched a new online open access journal, Digital Enlightenment Studies.
I'm, I can't say take a copy with you because it's online, but you can take with you a postcard, a beautiful design postcard, uh, outside.
So please have a look. It's a fantastic journal.
It's the it's establishing a whole area of research, and it contains wonderful articles, including one by Nico and his team in Helsinki were here.
And if you're inspired to send us an article, we'd like that too.
So, um, we've begun by, uh, founding this new online journal, Open Access.
It looks beautiful. And we're now in, in the same spirit, beginning a new series of, uh, annual lectures.
Um, it's a huge pleasure to have, Glenn to give this first lecture in the series.
Um, I think we will. We've met probably before, but the first time we met and worked together for a long time was when you were Mellon,
um, fellow in digital humanities, uh, funded, funded by the Mellon Foundation in 2011 to 2013.
And although you then left us and you went to the A and you were you were at the centre for research and you, of course, before that.
And since then you've been working in Chicago on the Art Artful project, producing amazing resources, and not least the Encyclopédie.
Um, and since 2018, Glenn has been professor of D.H. in the French department at the Sorbonne.
Um, but in all that time, you've also had a connection with the.
But we've maintained the connection with the Voltaire Foundation.
And, uh, you're currently, since 2021, the Astra Foundation research fellow in digital humanities.
And I also want to say a little bit of celebrating the way that the Voltaire Foundation is moving into digital research.
I do want to pay particular thanks to the Astra Foundation, um, who's represented by Elisabet.
The also Foundation three, four years ago made us an extraordinary grant which has enabled us to really establish ourselves in this area.
And this is a really transformational grant which has enabled us first to establish ourselves
in the area of digital research and to employ lots of younger researchers and younger people.
So it's played a really key part in helping us develop in that direction and encourage young researchers and scholars in Oxford.
We're incredibly grateful. Um, some of that was such as a hit, some lights,
and Glen has been the Astra Foundation research fellow and has been a key player in helping us directs that, um, that new direction of AI research.
Um, I also should mention Glenn's publications. Um, he published his thesis interest on the Literary Theory of Peggy, published by Oxford.
Um, I know that you were just a specialist for humanities research on political vocabularies.
Um, we work together on a book on Voltaire's correspondence and readings of quotation in Voltaire's correspondence.
Uh, this is a lovely digitising. Had to stick with Glenn Row, you know, monograph series published by Oxford.
Um, I'm here to advertise. Obviously. Um, we have copies on sale afterwards.
Um, and recently, I think Glenn's published a book called Observability of Earth, which we published.
We've done it with digital Zoom. So there's a hugely impressive list of publications, not to mention immensely distinguished articles.
Glenn and his colleagues from Chicago over here,
Robert Silk Lucas here of have done really pioneering work in thinking about data reuse and citation strategy and the Oscar party and the beast.
Um, and some of those things I think may come back into this lecture today.
I'm not sure I can get us clear what he's going to talk about. But crucially, Glenn's also just pulled off the the magic for everybody's session.
And, you know, so you consolidate a grant I think in year two which has a great title and a great logo.
Modelling enlightenment is modern. I should have said modern modelling enlightenment, reassembling networks of modernity through data driven research.
So the idea here is to use big data and to use that to shape that with thought experiment to to try and remap.
I think, well, I'm not Glenn, but I think the attempt will be to remap the way we can eventually think about French Enlightenment,
French Enlightenment writing. Um, I'm not sure how much today's lecture will draw on that.
We're going to see, but you have a great title, Poetics of Text Reuse Digital Intertextuality in the 18th Century archive.
Glenn is a fantastic pleasure to have you. Thank you very much. But I thank you so much, Nicholas.
And thank you all to to coming.
It's it's a really, really genuine and great pleasure to be here today to to to give this first annual lecture and digital,
uh, enlightenment studies uh, which is, as Nicholas just mentioned,
a field in which we're heavily invested, uh, in, in that collectively at the vault,
our foundation in Chicago, thanks to the Astra Foundation, uh, at the Sorbonne, uh, sort of a bit all over.
Uh, we're committed to, to to promoting, uh, this new field of research and to present to the world,
both in the form of this public lecture, but also the new open access, the journal that Nicholas mentioned.
The reason that so for both of these initiatives, uh, is the realisation that that this field of study, uh,
digital approaches to the 18th century in general has reached a certain maturity and digital collections,
uh, a certain critical mass, uh, which warrants and welcomes new scholarship and forms of academic outreach.
Uh, this is not to say that digital, uh, research has fully and finally been accepted by the humanities mainstream,
uh, but simply that we're perhaps on a better footing today than at any time in the past two decades.
Uh, certain barriers remain, uh, not just for digital 18th century studies, but for the wider digital humanities world,
uh, in general, who are still in some venues, uh, kept at a disciplinary distance.
It is often said, for example, that, uh, D.H. lacks sufficient theoretical grounding.
It's just the new positivism and all praxis, no theory.
Uh, and this is somewhat true if you attack literary and historical questions from a purely computational perspective,
uh, one text is the same as another, whether it's a novel or a grocery list once reduced to ones and zeros.
Uh, if, however, uh, you start from a theoretical framework such as intertextuality,
as we'll see today, or the idea of modelling as an epistemological exercise to,
uh, follow Willard McCarty, then the conversation between human and machine becomes all the more engaging.
And this is especially true in our current age of so-called artificial intelligence,
where large language models capable of reading whole universes of text and generating humanlike responses based on an almost infinite archive,
and are in dire need of theoretical, not to mention ethical, grounding from the humanities.
These models are the fever dream, I would argue, of post-structuralism,
and we need scholars conversant in theory with a capital T to understand these new artificial text realities.
What I'd like to present to you today, then, is perhaps surprisingly, much less technical and much more theoretical.
Uh, in terms of scope, uh, and this is quite intentional on my part, uh,
in a modest effort to demonstrate that thinking with and thinking through computational methods and approaches
to literary historical data can lead to real insights and uncover the rich complexity of humanistic,
generative intelligences, uh, that are all too often hidden in our ever growing digital archives.
So one such computational approach that we've been, uh,
using for years at the University of Chicago and elsewhere is the automatic detection of text reuse.
And this is a as I said, an old, old, old in computational terms goes back to 2002,
at least in its first official, uh, naming of text to use, uh, and it's quite, uh, prosaic in its definition.
It's the reuse of existing written sources in the creation of a new text.
Uh, and in this paper, they talk about a sort of similarity spectrum where you have information retrieval,
which is the classic, uh, document retrieval methods that go back to the 60s and 70s,
uh, bag of words models, if that's if that means anything to you, uh,
where we think about how documents are related to each other in a sort of semantic similarity space.
Text reuse is somewhere in the middle between the two,
and then on the right is the near duplicate detection, which we know and love as plagiarism detection.
Uh, in all of its glory. To think about this, theoretically, we might say that text reuse is a form of intertextuality.
Uh, and you could, which is a theory that comes out of the 60s and 70s in France.
Uh, Julia Kristeva is the first to use the term, uh. She uses it as a translation of Maxine's notion of dialogue ism.
Uh, and then it sort of takes off in the telco circle from there.
Uh, you could have a sort of conservative approach to intertextuality, which would be the Harold Bloom School of influence,
uh, where the, uh, criticism of the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem,
where poetic geniuses sort of have to grapple with the great giants of the past,
and they necessarily borrow from these, uh, from these, uh, predecessors to assert their own poetic authority.
More radically, uh, is the Berkeley and School of of intertextuality,
where every text becomes the sort of inter texts where other texts are always present in it at various levels,
in more or less recognisable forms, texts from the previous culture and those from the surrounding culture.
Every text then becomes the new fabric or tissue of quotations from the past.
Uh, between these two. I wouldn't say our position is between these two views.
I'd take a more middle road. Not surprisingly either more Ginetta in in my in my take of of intertextuality engineered to in his
great work on palimpsest two defines it as a relationship of co-presence between two or more texts.
That is to say, identically and most often by the actual presence of one text in another in its most explicit and literal form.
It is the traditional practice of citation, which I now put in the middle of our spectrum,
with or without inverted commas, with or without precise reference,
when the less explicit and less canonical form that of plagiarism, uh, which is an undeclared but still literal borrowing.
Clearly this today we think of text reuse a bit.
It's a bit sad, actually, as a form of plagiarism and almost exclusively as a form of plagiarism.
And this is because we have this notion that words belong to certain authors and can't be reused without their authorisation.
Uh, this is played out recently in academia.
And if you follow the poor plight of Claudine Gay, the first African-American woman president of Harvard who was fired, uh, ostensibly for plagiarism.
Uh, this article in the Guardian tells you exactly what a what a broad section this notion of plagiarism is.
And a certain Barbara Glatt, who was responsible for the turn it in software.
If you've ever used it, you know about it can be direct copying or something word for word without attribution.
Indirect the wholesale theft of ideas. Mosaic.
And this is a term that will come back today. Hold it in your mind, uh, changing some words while copying others, or even an honest mistake,
an error of omission and execution all things gay was accused to have done, even as she continues to stand by her scholarship.
These are all things I think we all do as, uh, as scholars.
Uh, and it's a it's once you move into the legalistic realm of plagiarism, that text reuse becomes a problematic practice.
But in the same article, if you move down, uh, the professor of uh, linguistic anthropology at Notre Dame, Susan Blum,
says that there's a sort of continuum, that it's too cut and dry to think of plagiarism just as as it's theft of other,
other people's words, and that somewhere between originality and complete copying,
there's a language and culture that moves into the middle, and that it is in this language and culture.
That term, perhaps text reuse inhabits, uh, this middle, this middle ground.
And I would say that that's exactly the case in the 18th century,
where they didn't yet have this notion of plagiarism as the theft of another author's word and that the culture, uh, gravitated.
The culture of citation gravitated between these two poles of originality and imitation.
And in a nutshell, the 18th century clearly is, uh.
Is dominated still at the beginning of the 18th century by this classical notion of imitation,
uh, which aesthetically was the model for, uh, hundreds of years.
And, uh, it it's predicated on this notion of the value of a work, uh, came from its conformity to the great works of the past.
And it was through these works that we could gain access to truth, beauty, nature, uh,
all of these higher level ideas of which the ancients were somehow the strict equivalent.
So, speaking of Virgil, for example, Pope remarks, uh, that perhaps he seemed above the critics law and but from nature's fountain scorn to draw.
But went examined. On every party came nature. And Homer were he found the same.
From the 18th century onwards and under the influence of German Romanticism, in particular literary works,
we understand as more or less the emanation of what was unique in each individual their genius, and at the same time the post.
The poet developed a new and immediate relationship with nature. Uh, one that didn't have to be based on representations of the ancients.
To see this in action. We look to Racine's preface to Britannicus from from 1676, where he praised the conformity of his work to that of Tacitus.
I copied my characters after the greatest painter of antiquity, Tacitus,
and I was then so full of reading of this excellent historian that there was not a striking feature in my tragedy,
for which he did not give me the idea for the model clearly of imitation.
Compare this with just 100 years later with Rousseau, as we know in his opening volley of the confessions,
where he takes pride in having no predecessor and indeed no successor.
Uh, I am creating a work that is without prior example and whose execution will have no imitators.
Never mind that generically he borrows his title from Saint Augustine, and then thematically he is very much continuing just the work of Montana.
Uh, Montana is in fact, uh,
key here because he demonstrates nicely for us the inherent ambiguity of a writer who is at once imbued with the tradition of imitation,
inserting his flirt into his text and already aware of his identity as a unique and original author,
giving himself over to the reader to turn to a new.
This notion of originality is inseparable from, I would say,
the idea of our idea of the formation of an idea that we can have of text for use in the 18th century.
And this is the notion that Ronan McKay, for example,
is demonstrated as being rather new to the 18th century and in fact tributary of the French Enlightenment.
Uh, this notion of originality as an aesthetic category, and in fact, the word isn't used in French until the until the very end of the 17th century.
Uh, by, uh, talking about the originality of paintings, one of a kind that can't be copied.
Zero goes on to use it in 1759, uh, as describing someone of a very original character.
The originality of the Baron declaration. The Danish minister to France to Sophie Valon.
The first dictionary enters the lexicon in 1743.
In the dictionary rival, who proudly proclaims that you won't find this word in any other dictionary.
So the originality of the definition of originality is here proclaimed the then to be repeated, but, uh,
a bit laconically in the dictionary Academy fonzie's as just the character of that which is original, uh,
of people or things, the the great Encyclopédie of which there will certainly be question today, uh,
plays with this semantic shift between original and originality, and it can be seen in these two entries.
And this is exactly how the UN security works, uh, which seems to be, uh,
which presents both the aesthetics of imitation that is still operative in the 18th century,
but also presents a that's sort of almost already exhausted, uh, by this time.
Huh. So it's in the first design or authentic, uh, instrument of something original,
which must serve as a model or an example of something to be copied or imitated.
Today we can hardly find any ancient title of possession, subjugation, etc. that is original there.
They're only or copies collated from the originals. So we've spent our originality.
And then the most important thing, of course, in the antiquity are the cross references.
So there's a cross reference to the originality, which we think is by the.
And he says, uh, it's a way of doing a common thing in a singular and distinguished way.
Originality is very rare, and most people are nothing but copy of each other.
Uh, the title of the original is given in good and bad ways.
One can only think of Rousseau there in the sense of an original, both good and bad.
Uh, so this, uh, this tension between imitation and originality, between copying, compiling and eventually plagiarism is central to the project.
Uh, uh, as the editor, zero and d'Alembert were dogged from the outset by accusations of impiety,
improper use of authority of authorities, and flat out plagiarism that on their response to their detractors.
In the introduction editor's introduction to the third volume, where he says, by its very nature,
therefore the Encyclopédie must contain a large number of things that are not new.
Among the various works at the Institute. He has been accused of borrowing from other dictionaries have been singled out.
The resemblance that is sometimes found between an article and an article in some dictionary is forced by the nature of the subject,
especially when the article is short and consists of only a definition of a minor historical fact.
This is so true that most dictionaries resemble each other in a large number of articles, because they simply cannot do otherwise.
So we are talking here about how you construct a dictionary, how you build it,
and typically practically how you build it is you started with the list of headwinds,
and you inherited this list of headwinds from other dictionaries.
And it was understood that if an older dictionary had a word in it,
you probably needed it in your dictionary whether you thought it was a good idea or not.
And DiDio takes this head on, and this is quite possibly my favourite article in the 74,000 articles of the Encyclopédie.
So here is the article. Egoism Zima in the dictionary how to travel.
So the direct predecessor of the encyclopaedia, which tells us it's a plant in Brazil or the islands of South America, and that's about it.
Diderot includes this article in the first volume, and he says he repeats it.
He just reuses the first bit of the article. Exact word for word. It's a plant that grows in Brazil, on the islands in South America.
This is all that we are told about it. And I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made.
It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the agua Zima than is contained in this description,
who do not need to learn that the magazine grows in their country.
It is. If you said to a Frenchman that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France and Germany, etc., and it's not meant for us either.
For what do we care that there's a tree in Brazil named Zima? If all we know about is its name, what is the point of giving the name?
It leaves the ignorant just as they were, and teaches the rest of us nothing, if all the same.
I mentioned this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly then,
as that of consideration for sun readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article,
even to find something stupid, then to find no article at all, really, uh, takes some license with this poetics of Reus to it.
But this really gets to the heart of this notion of compilation of how you had to construct a dictionary in the 18th century.
And so if we look at the article compiler, compiler, the compiler,
which is by sort of ironically, one of the great texture users of the answer to the Abbe melee,
uh, he tells us that it's a writer who does not compose anything of genius, but who is content to collect and repeat what others have written.
Very much not originality. However, most, like lexicographers, he tells us, are merely compilers.
And he goes on to talk about this notion.
And so but clearly somebody we would assume zero take some umbrage with this, with this idea of lexicographers being merely compilers.
And there is another cross-reference at the bottom, probably added by literal to plagiarist.
And so we get finally to plagiarism, and then it's a and it's a it's defined quite clearly at the beginning as a writer
who plunders other authors and gives their productions of being their own work,
this notion of plundering will come back in one of our titles, which was somewhat badly taken, but it's another story.
And then DeNiro goes on and he says. But lexicographers, at least those who deal with the arts and sciences, seem to be exempt from the law.
The common laws of mine and yours.
They do not claim to build their own land, nor to draw from it, from it the materials necessary for the construction of their work.
Indeed, the character of a good dictionary, such as we would like this one to be,
consists largely in making the use of the best discoveries of others.
What we borrow from others, we borrow openly in broad daylight, starting from the writers from which we have drawn our status as compilers.
And he repeats the term gives us a right and or title to take advantage of everything that we can contribute to the perfection of our purpose,
wherever it may be, may be found. If we steal.
It is only in imitation of the bees who gather.
Uh, for the profit, for the public good. And this notion of the of bees, I gather it goes back to the Renaissance.
Clearly, Montana even brings this up, as he's just a bee that's taking nectar from wherever he finds it for the better.
Good.
And it cannot exactly be said that we plunder authors again back to our title, but that we draw contributions from them for the benefit of letters.
So this, then, is how plagiarism is presented in the encyclopaedia at once.
Something that's bad, but given the right context, could be potentially quite good and in fact almost a moral duty.
Uh, and we'll see how this evolves. Uh, Voltaire takes this definition back up in his great work of, uh, text reuse.
The question answered in 1772.
Uh, and he has a sort of, uh, mercantile definition of plagiarism, uh, when an author sells the thoughts of another for his own.
This petty theft is called plagiarism. We could call plagiarism.
All the compilers, all the dictionary makers who do not, who do no more than repeat, uh,
opinions, errors, uh, impostors and truths already, uh, printed in previous dictionaries.
Uh, but they are at least plagiarism in good faith. They do not claim credit for invention.
They do not even claim to be, uh, uh, to have on earth the materials they have assembled from the ancients.
They have merely copied in the laborious compilers of the 16th century. They sell you a quote on what you already have in folio.
Uh, call them booksellers, if you like or not. Authors classify them as second hand writers rather than plagiarism.
This brings to mind the work of Antoine Compagno. I'm still going to do what I do the literature.
Finally, and most interestingly, uh, my model will take up this notion of plagiarism in the supplement copied in 1777.
And he, uh, is quite clear that it's no great thing to be.
It's no great tragedy to be to be a plagiarist.
And it's a sort of literary crime.
And it's not it's not so serious for which, uh, pedants, envious people and fools do not fail, uh, to put famous writers on trial.
So same true today as it was then.
Plagiarism is the name they give to a theft of thoughts, and they cry out against this theft as if they themselves were being robbed,
or as if it were essential to public order and peace, uh, that the properties of the mind should be invaluable.
Clearly this is before the law and modern laws on copyright.
Anyone who brings to light, uh, either to expression or appropriateness, I thought that was not as, um, but which would be otherwise lost.
Makes it his own by giving it a new being. For oblivion is like nothingness.
So here, plagiarism is a positive thing, and in fact, you have to do it.
You have a right to a posterity to reuse others in public law.
Uh, ownership of land is conditional and it not being cultivated on it.
It's being cultivated by the owner. Uh, uh.
And if the owner let it follow the society, which would have the right to demand, uh, that he give it up or sell it.
The same is true of literature. Uh, he who has seized the happy and fruitful idea, uh, and does not develop it,
leaves it as a common property for the first occupant who will know better than he does how to develop its richness.
So this is the sort of notion of plagiarism that we've we've taken on this notion of text reuse as a productive and in fact,
almost moral imperative in the 18th century, which clearly will be, uh, destroyed in the laws of 1791, 1793 of copyright and the right of the author.
But for most of the of the 18th century, this sort of free and open, uh,
plagiarist text reduces, is is operative, and nowhere more than in this in the antiquity.
And it follows Diderot.
d'Alembert continues in his advertisement from these reflections that the committee must often contain either extracts or even sometimes in full,
several pieces of of the best works of each genre. It is only important to the public that the choice be made with clarity in economy.
Uh, but it is also important for the authors to quote the originals accurately, both to enable the reader to consult them and to give each his due.
This is how several several of our colleagues have done it.
We wish that they had all done so. But in any case, uh, when an article is well done, it is equally enjoyable to read it.
Uh, whichever form, whichever hand it comes.
Uh, and the disadvantage of, uh, failing to quote which is always great in relation to the author, it's much less so in relation to the dictionary.
Let's bring this back to this, sort of this, this sort of provoked us years ago to, to to think about how,
how we can find these the quotations, uh, which were marked or sometimes not marked.
Uh, and these different reuses in the encyclopaedia and how we could put the answer properly,
which is the huge text, which is 74,000 article articles, 28 volumes in folio on this similarity spectrum.
To come back to this. So somewhat and we did tests and an information retrieval and similar article, uh, comparisons.
And we felt we tried plagiarism detection. It was a bit too strict.
And so this is how all of. This is the sort of preface to how we got to investigating automatic text reads, and we published two articles.
Again, I mentioned the first in Plundering Philosophers. And now you see where we get this title from, uh, in 2010, uh,
which experimented with all these different sorts of, uh, of, of, uh, information retrieval.
And then there's something borrowed which is more or less, uh,
outlining how sequence alignment, uh, an approach to text reuse can be particularly fruitful,
uh, for us, uh, and these are slides that I've, uh, in true text reuse manner has reused for at least 15 years.
Uh, the investigation of these sorts of relationships begins with identification of, of, of similar passages using sequence alignment,
which is a, which is a technique that's, that's used in other domains, uh, to find different strings of similarity.
Uh, so it's used a lot in bioinformatics to think about similar DNA sequences, a plagiarism detection, which I've mentioned.
And then inversely in text collation. So looking for uh, zones of, of uh variants into light traditions.
Uh, we were inspired Michelsen in particular an article at the time, it was inspired by the bioinformatic approach, uh, of sequence alignment.
This is still in use today.
Uh, colleagues in Helsinki are here that use the Blast algorithm, which comes directly out of, uh, the bioinformatic, uh, world.
Uh, at artful, we've developed Mark Olsen and now Carlos Gladstone, who is here, our own system called, uh, text pin.
This is as technical as I'll get today. It's not very technical at all.
Uh, but this is it. Give you an idea of what tax payer does, what the system does.
Uh, we take, uh, large databases, we pre-treat them, turn them in what's called n-gram.
So groups of words, uh, we look for the common sequences of these ngrams, uh, and then we adjust parameters.
There's a high flexibility. Again, plagiarism detection was a bit too strict.
What we're interested in, especially in my new project, is, uh, zones of, uh, where the same text is there,
but there might be changes or errors or things, you know, you can jump out of. So this, this idea of, of, uh, flexible parameters is very important.
And so if you take the first two lines of Rousseau's Social contract, learning about to read only fair, uh,
this is how we pre-treat the, the, uh, the document, uh, it becomes omnibus to leave about to fair, uh, you can see how this works.
The idea being that, um, Libor part two, uh, if shared between two documents that are not the same document, is a fairly rare event.
Uh, and given the rarity of this event, the algorithm will then think about, uh,
are there other n n-gram shared either to the left or right in a sliding window that we define?
Uh, so this is a deceptively straightforward, uh, notion of intertextuality.
It's the same set text, more or less in two different places.
Uh, but you'll as you'll see today, the range of text we use, uh, the detection of reuses was only the first step.
And in fact, it's understanding how these reuses are employed and deployed in the 18th century that it becomes really interesting.
So, for example, there's no real surprise that. The answer cites or uses that it was a known predecessor of the non-security.
And we find a very long segment at the end of the article on Spinoza.
But what is surprising is that at the end of the article, the event finishes in Bell's voice.
So he concludes the article in a funny budget.
So there's no quotation marks. Bell is mentioned at the beginning.
Uh, so there's something going on here, but it's a way of sort of putting Bailey in the anti-gravity.
His voice becomes part of the of the authorial fingerprint of the committee.
So he concludes the article whether or not the readers of the time knew this remains to be seen, but for us,
it was a clear indication that we had no idea what was going on here until the computer, uh, found this match.
It can do. We've we found this with lots of different work.
So, for example, the idea of using lock in the encyclopaedia is really, really interesting.
Uh, and we can do this using, uh, using text from, from echo, uh, which is a translation obviously.
Uh, and using lock in the encyclopaedia was a bold move.
Uh, lock second treatise was in France banned and burned.
It was on the index.
So if you said I'm going to say lock, uh, chances are the censor would come and say, you know, either take it out or you'll lose your privilege.
Uh, but, uh, is a man possessed, and he says, I'm going to use lock.
I just won't tell anybody what's going on here.
And so all through the article, uh, government is lots and lots of lock, uh, with no indication whatsoever, uh, that this is where it comes from.
Uh, and again, it's more or less it's not a copy. Equally, it's not, uh, that he's taking a bit of lock and just pasting it in for an article.
It's that he's weaving it into his own articles to support his own argument.
And it's it's very much how text reuse worked in, uh, in the 18th century as a way of generating meaning through the use of other models.
This, uh, caused us to think about the status of different works. What works could you cite in the notes you prepared?
Couldn't you could cite the only add, for example, was less controversial.
Uh, but you could never cite we shouldn't ever cite the, uh, Latrobe philosophy because, again, like, good luck, it was abandoned, burned.
And then there was a whole sort of spectrum of dangerous works that would make their way into obscurity.
It was really stupid to think about citing The Last Plague, because the list from 11 issues, in fact,
causes the Nazi Germany to lose its privilege, uh, because of its association with materialism.
But once again, so cool. Uh, he, uh, is quite insistent, so he uses a bit of, uh, the recipe in his article on, uh, the, uh, mine.
Uh, but he gives a tip of the hat here. He says to people, oh, here it is.
There's no there's no quotation marks. Uh, there's just this passage and he says, see, decomposition in the social class.
So it's up to the reader to understand who is this Bush-Cheney? Uh, what's going on?
Is it? And would they recognise this is Eldridge shows. Not so sure.
Uh, it's true. There's a whole system of coding that goes on the property.
So at least on philosophies Voltaire, Lupu, Euclid's, Montesquieu.
Uh, there's lots of different other ways of referring to people.
But this is, again, a case where perhaps the readers of the 18th century saw what was going on.
So short readers today certainly do not some specialist maybe, uh, but it's a real area where, uh, the computer can bring us to new knowledge.
And this was published it, of course, with Dana Justin and Robert Marcy.
And then we continued along this vein, thinking about hidden voices in The Secret,
which is a polyphonic work, as you saw with the sort of incorporation of Bell.
Uh, maybe we know those 140 authors, but maybe there's many, many, many more that we just don't know about.
Uh, and one of these, of course, was was Emily Chatelain.
And somebody knew that the article was, in fact, drawn more or less from her, uh, instead situated on the physique.
And so we digitised or we took a digitised version of the institution, the physique, and we compared it to the encyclopaedia.
And what was it? It was really interesting. We found, I think, 13 articles with at least some Emily Chatelet.
She is, of course, not an author. There's only one female author in the annals seem to be any and Darrow refers to as an anonymous woman.
It's a bit sad. We think it's called wife. That's an article on fashion.
Uh, that's the only woman in the list. But nonetheless, you can see that some of these articles and we've given them the scores.
And how much Du Chatelet is in there. Contradiction is 95% du Chatelet.
Uh, and the reason that form is mentioned everywhere is that there was this guy named Senator for me,
was the secretary of the Academy of Berlin, and he had he was going to make his own dictionary.
And then he heard about delivering that on Bell, and he got discouraged.
And so he gives his papers to that on there. He says, do what you want with them.
But if. He just cribs and steals from me today in many places and so on.
Bill doesn't quite know that what's going on, and so he puts this into the answer, Billy.
But in fact all of these articles continue, for example, then on verse as these come from the papers of Samuel Fournette.
But it's a media shack today. Uh, so this sort of gives us this notion of, uh, there are these articles that should rightly,
somehow or we should somehow mention them today as being at least,
uh, a co-author, uh, with, uh, with these others and then, uh, recently or somewhat recently, uh, we thought about translation as read.
So if, you know, sort of the history of the institute, it started out as a translation project of the English Cyclopaedia, Ephraim Chambers,
and then eventually quickly, uh, it got out of hand and they decided, well, this is it's going to be much more than just a translation.
But they had this, this block of text, of translations of articles that were started by different people.
Uh, and we're never quite sure where they occur in the security.
There are articles that have a mention, uh, and here Paolo says that many times they left these articles and just just used them as filler,
uh, almost unchanged without significant modifications.
Uh, but there's never been a sort of systematic undertaking of how to find these articles.
Some are marked with this and, uh, and reference to chambers.
There's about 1100 of these. And, uh, this is a good article, uh, a guide to the law by women.
And you can see, uh, what we wanted to do was somehow draw this connection between, uh, the chambers at the bottom and the, uh, at the top.
And at the time, I think it's 2018. 2019. It was before these great multilingual language models.
I'm sure now today we could do it much more easily. Levels probably have different ways, but we did it in a in a pretty hand-cranked way.
As we said, as we digitised the 1742 chambers, which was the chambers that Darrow owned.
Uh, we ran it through Google Translate automatically, and we kept the structure and we built a virtual dictionary, a sort of fake French chambers.
And with that French chambers, we ran the sequence alignment against it to find articles.
So, for example, an accuracy comes back and we had to really, uh, get fine grained on our comparisons because obviously it's a modern translation.
So for example, it totally has no idea what a petticoat government might or might not be.
It's a uppity motto. It makes no sense whatsoever.
It's a terrible translation, but there's enough. Uh n-gram.
There's enough content in there that we're able to to get a match.
Uh, and again, uh, it was already signed by chambers, uh, and we only found about 800 of the 1100.
So it could be due to translation, could be due to lots of different things.
But we found like 2500 more articles that had no mention to chambers whatsoever.
So, for example, a friend, the MLA, writes the article demoniac, which is a word for word,
uh, the same amount of paragraphs, the same more, uh, cross-references that chambers.
It's taken clearly directly from chambers. And he signs his name to it.
So again, is this the chambers article, or is this the animal?
It's, uh, moving on.
This is sort of to give you a very synthetic view of how we envision text reuse detection.
We're progressively moving out of the city rapidly and into the sort of larger communication world of of print culture in the in the 18th century.
This is Robert Darwin's famous communication network.
And the idea here is that information flows in the 18th century through all sorts of different channels.
Oddly enough, correspondence doesn't show up on his communication network, which I have always found a bit odd.
Uh, but again, this goes back to our time here. Uh, my time here in Oxford with Nicholas, one of the,
one of the first ideas we had was electronic enlightenment correspondence in general should be really rich for text for years.
There should be some sort of platform in which text for use, uh, is filtered through this information space that is at one time,
uh, sociable, but also, uh, a way of diffusing information, a way of building literary authority and otherwise.
So we all know electronic enlightenment. And you give you an example of how, uh, this sort of thing can work with poor correspondence.
We can take an event like the the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755.
It happens in November 1st. And we know that Voltaire gets news of this, gets wind of this, and it sort of shakes his faith in.
In, uh. In an optimistic worldview in divine providence.
And he writes upon and. And we find traces of the Pope already in January 1756.
So it's very fast in terms of early modern, and it's just a little bit and it's, uh, uh, someone that's right to run.
Hello. Who says while I was in his presence and he recited this poem and I have these last eight verses,
uh, and it's a very funny letter, uh, because he says he wrote this poem.
I was sent the eight verses which enclose here. I have reason to believe that it is in his own admission.
It seemed to me these were a little materialistic things, and I've replied so.
But there's no indication here. I've replied with a few fragments of my own translation of Van Haller's, uh, work on, uh, the origins you met.
Uh, so this is a really a sort of Frankenstein poem here.
That is eight lines of Voltaire, eight lines of, uh, translation of, uh, of Eisenhower's work, which he does directly into, into the correspondence.
So this is this poetics of text reuse.
That's, that's been and if we compare the eight lines by Voltaire, we can see this is, uh, we talked about this this afternoon,
this idea of at some point you get to the end point of these reuses,
you want to see what the what the, the differences are rather than the similarities.
And in this case, the last two lines don't make it into the final cut.
And because we're using modern, uh, modern text from the Voltaire Foundation, uh, we wouldn't get this end of this, this couplet comfort,
you know, maternal mortality for Soufriere to Sumatra, where the Voltaire thought this was a bit depressing and he doesn't continue on with it.
Uh, but it's a way of recreating this, this sort of notion of his creating through the correspondence that was creating, uh, different ways.
He's retouching his work, and eventually the sequences get longer as we go on.
And so by March, uh, it's much longer. And it's another letter to Von Harlow where he says, I was in the present, and he gave us that road to shake.
So we know it's a retouched piece. And again, here we can show, uh, that more or less it's the same version, right?
There's a few differences. Providence and presence has been changed to prime, uh, live.
But again, this this can tell you how the correspondence is really interesting to see different states of,
of a work which don't quite make it into editions or might not make it into conditions, but good ones, they work.
Uh, finally. Uh oh. And then we know as a sort of, uh, media event, somebody sends a letter to Russo and says,
what, are you going to let this guy question divine providence?
And, of course, Rousseau was always up to the challenge. And he responds with this really long letter, which is about 6000 words, uh,
which gets printed as on optimism and, and, and and sort of, uh, flies all over you.
Voltaire was not very happy about this, that his letter was printed.
Uh, and so we can only assume that one of the responses to this in the same year that on optimism was, was, uh, published is probably content.
So, again, this way of thinking of, uh, reuse as a way of, uh, of augmenting or understanding, uh, cultural dissemination.
And also, uh, I'd be remiss not to mention just the way that Voltaire reads and reads with his correspondence,
which is really he was like a Reader's Digest. Uh, and he loved to exhibit works, and he send it to his friend.
So here is another added distance works. It's published posthumously, 1771, uh, or 1773.
Here Voltaire is taking little snippets out of it, sending it to, uh, that on there and saying, oh, don't you think this is great?
It's too bad. It's actually a pretty bad book. Uh, he does the same thing for Mademoiselle, the font, uh, which is nice, because she's blind.
Uh, so he's sort of saying, here, I'm giving you all the good parts.
Don't waste your time with the book. It's a bad book.
But I've given you the good things.
And he says, I take these little diamonds at random, and there are thousands of this tastes whose brilliance struck me.
That does not prevent the book from being very bad.
I spend my life looking for precious stones in manure, and when I find the sum, I put them aside and make a profit from them.
That's why bad books are sometimes very useful. So here, in a nutshell, is this sort of text reuse poetics of the 18th century.
So this is notion of somehow you accrue through this dissemination of, of different of both the act of extracting, uh,
these precious diamonds from books, but also sending them out so we can't pick it up unless somebody sends it out.
So text reuse can only help you in this moment that somebody reuses the text again.
Um, but again, it's a whole question.
So we have writers notebooks, for example. So Voltaire knows he has his notebooks.
So these are the things that he writes down, these these quotations of how what's the moment that the quote,
he decides the quotation is going to move out into, into the world. And so all of this, to move finally to the new, uh, project we have now, which is,
which is to think precisely about, uh, this whole sort of network or this whole sort of realm or cultural system.
Uh, that is the 18th century based on reuses. So we want to think about intertextual networks.
Don't worry too much about this network. They all sort of look like giant hairballs when you do it.
But Voltaire is always in the middle just because, uh, as I said, he was a real texter user.
Uh, and this project, uh, called modern that Nicholas mentioned, uh,
is based on this notion that perhaps we can think about the exchange of text we use.
So not just identifying the reuses, that's the first step, but thinking about how the reuses travel and are used and reused, uh, through networks.
And so borrowing from work from Danielle Stein, who started looking into networks at Stanford with the Mapping the Republic of Letters project,
more recently, thinking about social network analysis as a as a way of understanding cultural exchange, uh, through different, different areas.
And here, Ruth and Sebastian Anand have been instrumental in promoting this approach in, in the humanities.
Uh, they have a wonderful new book out I recommend to everyone called Tutor Networks of Power.
There were also, of course, uh, an Oxford Studies collection by Dan and, uh, Chloe Edmunds and thinking about how to use social and network analysis.
For the humanities. And a good primer. Again, it's by Ruth and Sebastian with with Katherine Coleman and Scott Weingarten at work.
Turn. For my own part.
To keep this notion of theorising, uh, into it, I, uh, I add a sort of extra layer of what Bruno Latour calls the actor network theory.
And here, the way we think about this with the networks that we want to build, uh, the two advantages of actor network theory.
One is that, uh, it's it's, uh, there's no presuppositions.
There's no, uh, a priori, uh, you simply generate these networks and you try to trace where the data takes you.
So it's very online with what we call data driven research.
You build the data sets, you run the algorithms over it, what comes out then you try to make sense of, uh,
and also within this sort of intellectual framework of, uh, actor network theory, actors can be anything they need, not be human beings.
Uh, they can be books, they can be texts, they can be snippets. Uh, they can be speed bumps.
There's another Tor tells us it's anything that affects the behaviour or the predicted behaviour of a network.
Uh, and another important takeaway from this is that sometimes it's not the originators nor the receivers,
but it's the mediators that are in fact the most important nodes in a network.
Uh, but to do this, of course, we have to have a lot of data.
And this is what we've been doing for the past couple years, compiling lots and lots of data as much as we can get in the 18th century realm,
with the only caveat being that we don't digitise anything.
So the idea is that digitised collections are significantly sufficient now that we should use it,
and that because, yes, there are lots of errors and because, yes, they come from OCR, uh, there are errors.
We should nonetheless use them. So we've taken uh, a mixture of, uh, corrected works, which we call canon.
So the, the distinction is only qualitative and archive, which are OCR.
So we're about 12,400 books. Uh, in this, in this main collection, which we will then compare iteratively through pamphlets,
letters, dictionaries and finally the press which we're working on with the BNF.
Uh, and the notion here is to think about to that communication network of Darnton, uh, that it's not just books, uh,
that are important in the 18th century, but how they move through things like pamphlets, letters, and especially the press.
Very interesting to have a think about, uh, just scale.
I think now we have some notion that the press will be about 300,000, 300 million words.
So we're up to a billion words, which is completely arbitrary.
But it's what I said in my, uh, grant proposal that we get a billion words.
But the idea being that with a billion words, you can build your, uh, your own data, uh, your own large language model for the 18th century.
So we can think about either fine tuned one of them, but maybe we can ask Voltaire some questions,
uh, through the language model that we built nonetheless.
Uh, so what? Who cares? This is the question I tell my students.
Just put it in. So what? So what? Uh, what can we do then?
We have all this data. We're going to run these alignments. We're going to we're going to have to filter them.
But that's a whole that's a question. That's a story for another time.
Uh, the first thing we want to do is just simply supplement traditional methods.
It's just new ways of, uh, of doing what historians have always done,
but on steroids and in some sense, in a way that's, uh, both faster and perhaps more comprehensive.
So it will contain a the modern database will contain a great number of these intertextual reuses,
make it possible to sort of follow the fortunes of inter text or concepts as they move through this information space.
This is very much the sort of conservative side of intertextuality come from Harold Bloom.
So to take one example, we have, uh, Barlow, uh, who writes, uh, reading a book would have laid over all of them.
But this is very much an aesthetic judgement. It's talking about verisimilitude.
It's about how, uh, how a text, a fiction, uh, can has to be, has to be sort of true for people to embrace it.
Uh, and you can sort of follow it as it moves through the 18th century.
Uh, and so cognac brings it up. But in speaking about imagination.
So it's still very much the aesthetic, this notion that it's still verisimilitude,
but he's talking about the imagination and how the imagination forms and fables and fictions, etc.
Uh, by the time you get to Samuel Johnson, the Rebecca, he repeats it.
He has quotation marks. It's good, but he undermines completely.
Barlow and he says, ran a book on a railway racer, the demon quokka, Cedric Campbell.
Very true. So even though the person that wrote it never wrote a word of truth.
Uh, and then by the time we get to the revolution. This is an interesting text, which I'll talk about here shortly, called The Impulse Electric.
You can, uh, you can see that. There's no indication at all that it's Bollo, so no idea that's what the text is there.
But just by its context, you can see that it's changed into a moral category.
Uh, this true? This is very different from the beginning.
From what? And so which by this time it's changed completely in its valence.
So that's just one example of what you could do with our data set.
Secondly, this gets to what Nicholas was mentioning early earlier.
In a sense of distant reading, we hope we can really sort of remap literary the literary history of the 18th century
using these sort of social network analysis and how they move through the different thing.
And this sort of presupposes a sort of radical, uh, notion of intertextuality, where everything is in an inter text.
And in fact, it's more it's more about this process of dissemination that tells us, uh, not of reproduction, but of productivity.
So an inter text or a cluster of inter texts is a productive force, uh, sometimes without an author, without any reference to intentionality.
It's just these reuses that sort of move through these texts.
And so we have to sort of think about different ways of thinking about authorship, how we understand authors in this, in this, in this text.
And for us, it's just one attribute, uh, of a text object.
So the text is primordial for us, the text that circulates, that moves its way through.
If we know the author, great. If we don't, it's all right. Uh, we hope to find it at some point.
And these are attributes that can be derived from other relationships between texts, objects, and then an author object.
If we talk about author objects in our networks, uh,
it's the result of the combination of all these different characteristics attributed to it by the relations between the text objects.
So this is a sort of, uh, an author's important, uh, not because of what we read about literary history,
but it's in their place in the network and their sort of lines of force as we users.
This also causes us to think about what the text, uh, very prosaically, for us,
the text is the sort of concordance of at least four similar trigrams, uh, that follow within a defined interval.
Uh, but this poses all sorts of questions. And, uh.
All reuses are not equal. So for example and this comes from Dario Nicolas, you found this great example of Marat during the revolution,
uh, reuses whether consciously, whether on purpose or not, we don't know.
It doesn't really matter. Uh, fentanyl. So you would never join these two together?
Uh, he changes it a bit. New becomes Diego.
Uh, but the context is completely different. I mean, it just couldn't be clearer.
And so here we are, like, this is what we want. This is exactly what we want.
But nonetheless, in the bottom here and the the titles are the same.
And we'd say this is really interesting, but if you look at the text, it's not interesting at all.
It's reuse. It's an inter text. You can't say it has an author.
It circulates. It has some value, but we're not quite sure.
Uh, so this sort of gets us into this notion.
And this is exactly why we always we've been trotting out this, this notion of bath for 15 years, but we never quite got to the end of the quotation.
And then he says, in fact, intertextuality is a condition of any text whatsoever.
It's obviously not reducible to a problem of source and influences,
which is what we've always thought into text is a general field of anonymous formulas,
the origin of which is rarely identifiable of unconscious or automatic quotations given without inverted commas.
So this is how do you find that? How do you understand that? What does that mean?
Uh, and how can we, uh, implement that into our into our networks and then find a come back to, isn't it?
He says, in fact, some texts are really, really hyper textual.
And this is before Tim Berners-Lee. So it's a it's a theoretical hypertext.
Uh, there's no literary work that to some degree in depending on the reading does not evoke another.
Uh, and in this sense, all works are hypertension.
But like Orwell's and Animal Farm, some are more hyper textual, more obviously massively in explicitly than others.
You know, CBD is one of these, uh, Voltaire's questions on security is one of these hyper textual works.
Uh, and we find them again and again in popping up the Republican.
This is a, uh, a beginning, a sort of very preliminary, uh, look at network, uh, measures.
It kept popping up. We didn't even know what it was. It was just in our it was in our corpora.
Uh, and then we looked at it and we said, oh, this makes perfect sense why it would be there and why would have these high scores?
Uh, because it it's a text reuse machine. Uh, and he writes it in at the very beginning of, of the revolution, and he says,
I'm offering it to these students, all these little maxims, all these little princes.
And you have one a day, uh, that you're meant to read and think about and ruminate on.
And it's for the entire Republican calendar. Uh, and so again, we thought, well, this is really interesting.
We should be able to find more than we thought. But in fact, it was a lot of work.
And Dario had to do a lot of hand checking for these different things.
But we can find the sort of modern sources.
There's a lot of Rousseau, there's some Benjamin Franklin, there's some Claude, there's a history of China.
Uh, so it's very syncretic and it's sort of, uh, where these come from.
But there's a whole mass of maxims, uh, of reasons that we, we can't identify and, and that remain unidentifiable.
And so if you just take one day.
So this is the first decade of, uh, one decade of pretty major, uh, you can see the, the different sort of pathways that go through here.
We can't some we haven't found.
It goes from Benjamin Franklin to Voltaire to lawyer, uh, back to Franklin's, uh, Sinek, uh, Benjamin Franklin Duplo, etc.
Uh, so it's a really fascinating work. Uh, it causes you to go in and really get into the text which Dario is proclaimed, as do close reading.
So that's sort of a lovely pun on close reading. Uh, but it's interesting to see how these transformations happen.
Again, there's no indication of the author in this text. There's just the reuse.
Uh, but you can see that there are certain changes that happen for whatever reason in this case,
in the first case with this history of Louis the 12th and Adam is changed into in the Atlantic, a comma changes completely.
The text, it's a different text. So it's it's still the clue is it is a different who does it belong to?
What does it mean? Uh, secondly, Virginia Seaborne.
So this goes back to this notion of originality, less privacy by less pressing.
What is it? So it's more about rationalism. Uh, less than originality.
So this is this sort of hyper textual, um, text, and it gets really wild if you, if you, if you move it out here we have two lines from lucid.
Uh, they appear to be near patterns. Increase their sources.
Seymour, tell who they are and then mark two lines from the. I had you.
Come on. Uh, and also with a little note about you, I had the book from Butler as a feature in, uh, the sixth decade of, uh, number 30.
You have both these lines that have been melded together. Multiple identities, two sources similar to point, but double.
So, Paul, Paul Butler, uh, shows up out of nowhere, just thrown in there.
John. Don't go I don't I won't do it in the future.
Uh, so it's a completely who does this play? Is this corner? Is this Voltaire?
What is Ballard doing there? Uh, what's going on?
Uh, so again, this is this the computer takes you only so far.
Uh, and then you have to just sort of think about what's going on.
And then finally another text that's popped up, which is completely crazy.
And I'll end on this is this text by Jean-Marie Chassagne, who was completely unknown.
It's too bad. Uh, Katrina, Seth isn't here today.
She might be one of the few people with Michelle DeLong who actually knows who this person is, because it showed up in her anthology of.
French poetry from 2008. And he's this sort of illuminator.
He's one of the illuminists or. And Mesmer comes from Lyon and he writes this insane book called The Cataracts of the imagination.
Flood of screwball mania, literary vomit, small encyclopaedic haemorrhage.
Monster of monsters by a minute is the inspired who publishes The Lock of the coffin for years,
so I don't know how you would critically edit that text.
Where do you put it? Where do you map that up?
The vision really gets a little more specific, and it's an insane book,
but it's really interesting because I think it's the culmination of this really open poetics of reuse for the 18th century.
And he has this preface position. So he says, I'm not going to write a preface.
And then he writes 100 pages of preface where it says, I'm just weaving together here prose and verse.
I call on all the annals to my aid. I call on all the authors are review them.
As the new dictator of the literary republic. I indulge in the factions who make this names, etc. so you get sort of where he's going.
My pamphlet fleshed out.
It's four volumes, by the way, not quite a pamphlet fleshed out in this way with historical traits swollen with the simulations of the mind,
studded with quotations of all kinds, becomes a literary mosaic. And this goes back to what I said at the beginning, and you can see it.
He takes great inspiration from one Montana because he said,
Montana is great because he who put a chapter title and then [INAUDIBLE] give you a chapter.
It has nothing to do with the title. And he thinks that's amazing.
Uh, and then so there so you can see the sort of inspiration from Bell in all of his notes, notes to notes.
So he has one for one sentence here. Revolt. The uncle used to keep too young.
Some more. There's a there's there's an asterix note.
There's another note that goes on for two more pages. Just commentary himself.
And he's both. He's a that's a fantastic work. Sometimes he cites where it comes from.
Other times there's nothing. Uh, so again, it's this machine.
It's a, it's a sort of text reuse machine.
Um, I won't read all of his quote, but he gets really into this notion of how he's building, uh, with all the different,
uh, all these different types of texts, what he calls, uh, we have to build a type of encyclopaedia.
So he's taking up this notion of the on site as we come back to it, uh,
we have to use this idea of universality, uh, with a multiplicity of their talents as the poet,
to throw into the same more of the sort of the epigram, the roses, the vegetation, the nettles,
etc. every genre, every author, the entire 18th century should come to bear on this text.
And he continues on this bizarre, overflowing.
So this sort of expansion of wandering thoughts and hidden passages does not require a very strange effort of the imagination.
Uh, imaginative, which I wasn't quite sure what the word is in French, with dictionaries, collections, patient copyists and time.
The most limited scribe is capable of populating the literary universe with encyclopaedic monsters, so to echo hard times,
with the right tools, the right large language model, the right resources, we too could build these sorts of poetic model monsters.
And perhaps that's precisely what language models like GPT are encyclopaedic monsters.
Ditto, of course, already for saw this monstrosity in the making of his own secret belly when he
took stock of their universal universe and sort of universal text in 1755,
far from the perfect system of human understanding that was proposed by Dan on Bear in the in the preface,
in the discord plenum in there, what they had was uneven, unwieldy, and ultimately uncontrollable.
The proof can be found in 100 places in this work. Here we are bloated and exorbitantly fat.
There we are, lean, petty, pathetic, dry and scrawny.
In one place we are skeletal and another we rather seem drop sickle.
We are by turns dwarves and giants, classes and pygmies, standing straight, nicely built and well-proportioned, hunchbacked, lame and deformed.
Add to all these quirks that of a text which is sometimes abstract, recondite and mannered, more often careless,
drawn out and diffuse, and you will compare the work to a monster of the poetic art, or even to something more hideous.
Yet, as the predecessor to Wikipedia and perhaps even the internet, or at the very least the World Wide Web,
and in direct lineage with the other imaginary machines of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, of Alan Turing, of Vannevar Bush.
Uh, the poetics of re-use enacted by the Encyclopaedia, and indeed,
as we've seen over the entirety of the 18th century, is a relatively modern, if not to say contemporary phenomenon.
And we who live now amongst the encyclopaedic monsters of AI, would then do well not to forget our history.
To return very briefly to our illuminated poet.
I tried to find more information of the 19th century biographies of the great French literature.
It just as it was born in died. And it gives a list of his work.
But at the very end there's a very curious note where it says, Mr. Qassim, you left behind a many,
many a manuscript which his brother, a grocer in Leon, used to wrap the medicines in his shop.
Clearly, this is yet another example. Perhaps not so much intractable in computational terms of the poetics of text reuse.
Thank you very much.