# Poe reference set: *The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2* (tales)

A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, the fourth beside O. Henry
(`../v2/claude/`), Wharton (`../wharton/`) and Jacobs (`../jacobs/`). Claude wrote every summary,
predicament, group and option here by reading the scenes. **No local or hosted inference was used.**
Compare the local-model runs against it. It is not ground truth, just one careful reading.

| File | What it is |
| --- | --- |
| `corpus/tales-vol2.txt` | Project Gutenberg #2148 (Raven Edition, vol. 2), plain text, public domain |
| `split_gutenberg.py` | → `stories.json` (22 tales) and `chunks.json` (369 scenes, median 258 words), using the same 320-word paragraph rule as `../chunk.py`. Titles are matched against the upper-case headings after normalising, because the headings differ from the contents list: trailing periods, a curly apostrophe, "MAELSTROM" without the ring, and "SILENCE—A FABLE" with no spaces. The front matter, the redactor's note, "Notes to the Second Volume" and the licence are dropped. |
| `dump.py` | `python3 dump.py A B` prints scenes A..B for reading (copied from `../jacobs/`) |
| `claude/batches/sNN.json` | per story: `{chunk, story, summary, predicament}`, the same schema as the sibling probes |
| `claude/groups_src.py` | the groups, options and per-story protagonist standing |
| `claude/build.py` | checks everything, then writes `claude/records.json` and `claude/groups.json`. It is identical to Jacobs' copy, since its paths are relative to the file. |
| `claude/page.py` | → `claude/REFERENCE.html`, the readable page |

Rebuild: `python3 split_gutenberg.py && cd claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py`.

## What is in it

- **369 predicaments**, one sentence each: median 20 words, range 15 to 24. They follow the
  `redescribe.py` rules, so there are no names, titles, places or story-only objects. The
  `topic_words` leak check flags 67 of 369. Most of those are role words (visitor 18, rival 13,
  host 7, guest 5, husband 4), kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles. The real leaks are
  place words: "house" 17, "room" 5, and "street", "boat" and "church" once each. Poe's situations
  are often *about* a house, so "house" usually belongs to the predicament rather than naming a
  setting.
- **24 groups**, each a situation that recurs in **two or more stories**. Each scene sits in at most
  one group: 253 are assigned and **116 fit nothing that recurs**. The unassigned scenes are
  concentrated in a few tales, and that is a fact about Poe, not a gap in the reading. *Landor's
  Cottage* (17 of 17 unassigned) and most of *The Domain of Arnheim* (15 of 22) are landscape
  description with no predicament in them. So are the metaphysics of *Mesmeric Revelation* (8 of
  14), the Sinbad voyage inside *Scheherazade*, and the essay openings of *Von Kempelen*, *The
  Premature Burial* and *The Imp of the Perverse*. They were summarised anyway.
- **Options**: 4 or 5 per group, 113 in all. 97 come from what someone in a scene did (`scene:N`),
  6 are archetypes and 10 fill gaps. **12 scene options cite a scene outside their own group**, and
  `groups.json` marks each one `in_group: false`. All 12 are within two scenes of a member in the same
  story (8 are the scene directly before or after), the same pattern the Wharton reference found.
- **Moves**: spine paths with a direction only (`+`, `-`, `risk`, `set`). There are no magnitudes.
  Skill labels proposed for this corpus: **`nerve`**, holding steady under dread, and **`reason`**,
  keeping your head and thinking it through. `reason` covers the searcher in *The Purloined
  Letter*, the fisherman reading the whirlpool, and the prisoner working out the strap under the
  blade. Poe's heroes survive by that faculty far more often than by courage.
- **Stage** comes from protagonist standing, judged **per story, not per scene**, and recorded in
  `STANDING` in `groups_src.py`. The corpus leans high: 9 of 22 tales have a noble or wealthy
  protagonist, so 14 of 24 groups land in the `high` stage.

## Groups against the existing catalogue

The 36-entry catalogue in `../catalogue/` is built from O. Henry, Wharton and Jacobs. Judged by
reading, not by `classify.py`:

- **Overlapping (5):** G16 *A sound in the night* is the catalogue's `dread` almost exactly. G22 *A
  fortune everyone is watching* is `after_your_money` / `strings`. G19 *Going to the bad* is close
  to `habit`. G15 *At the mercy of someone without pity* is a harsher `power_over_you`. G23 *Hidden
  in plain sight* shares ground with `cant_prove_it`.
- **Partly overlapping (4):** G17 *A place that works on you* is a sharper `dread`: the thing to
  face is the place itself, and reasoning feeds the fear. G09 *A rival who is your mirror* is not
  the courtship `rival` but an equal who thinks your thoughts. G20 *A love you are not free to have*
  touches `rival` and `past_comes_back`. G03 *Hiding what you did* borders on `caught_out`.
- **New (15):** G01 *The urge you cannot resist* (the perverse compulsion), G02 *Safe, and about to
  give yourself away*, G04 *Shut in the dark, and no one knows* (buried or sealed alive), G05 *The
  one you gave up for dead*, G06 *Death coming slowly, and one cool head*, G07 *Nobody will believe
  what you saw*, G08 *The reminder that will not go away* (guilt given a shape), G10 *A revenge they
  cannot escape*, G11 *Walled off from the danger outside*, G12 *A companion who may not be sane*,
  G13 *Sent for by a friend in a bad way*, G14 *Experimenting on the dying*, G18 *Your companion
  breaks*, G21 *Someone you love fading into a stranger*, G24 *A world of your own*.

`dread` is the only existing entry this corpus lands on squarely. The Jacobs `dread` group means
"something may be out there in the dark". Poe's material splits that into several sharper
situations. In G01 and G02 the danger is inside you. In G04 and G05 it is someone being buried. In
G08 it is your own guilt, and in G12 it is someone else's mind.

## How this corpus differs

- **The danger is usually internal.** The O. Henry, Wharton and Jacobs catalogue is social: rivals,
  secrets, money, scheming. In Poe the counterpart is often the protagonist's own compulsion
  (G01, G02), their conscience (G08), or their perception (G12, G16, G17). Actor, wants,
  counterpart still fits, but "counterpart" is often "the thing they are fixed on" or "the
  reminder", not a person. A pack built from these needs options that move `nerve` and `reason`
  far more than `relationships.*`.
- **Groups are more concentrated.** With 22 tales that mostly run on a single obsession, many
  groups are one tale plus a few echoes. The top story takes 86% of G23 (*The Purloined Letter*),
  78% of G20, 77% of G09 (*William Wilson*), 75% of G11 (*The Masque of the Red Death*) and 71% of
  G14 (*Valdemar*). The Wharton rule of at most 50% from one story would cut 16 of the 24 groups.
  G06 has 19 scenes from only two tales, the whirlpool and the pit, because both are long, slow
  ordeals of the same shape.
- **Some tales hold a group almost alone.** G07 *Nobody will believe what you saw* spans 6 tales,
  but 9 of its 15 scenes are the queen whose true wonders are dismissed as lies. They are all the
  same situation, so they are kept together, not trimmed to a quota.
- **Several tales are not stories.** *Mesmeric Revelation* and *Von Kempelen* are mostly essay,
  and *Arnheim* and *Landor* are mostly description. They inflate the scene count without adding
  predicaments. A tool should expect a "no predicament here" answer for whole tales, not just for
  stray scenes.

## Known defects

- **The tail rule drops five endings.** The chunking rule discards a story's final paragraph run
  when it is under 80 words. Five tales lose their endings that way, all of them load-bearing: the
  rescue in *The Pit and the Pendulum* (66 words), the dying double's last words in *William
  Wilson* (66), the host found dead in *The Assignation* (61), the ghostly absolution in
  *Eleonora* (41) and the closing lines of *The Imp of the Perverse* (20). The rule is kept as
  specified so the probes stay comparable, but for this corpus it cuts the resolution of tales that
  end on a short, sharp paragraph. The summaries describe only what is in each scene.
- **Four scenes are epigraphs or subtitles only**: 131, 196, 221 and 287, at 6 to 46 words. Each
  is an epigraph or subtitle followed by a paragraph long enough to start a new scene. They are
  kept so that `chunks.json` stays the corpus as split, and none is in a group.
- Poe's footnote markers (`(*1)` and so on) are left in the text. The notes themselves are in the
  dropped end matter.