JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5.5
3a4758172d
Fourteen corpora split and classified: aesop, bierce, chekhov, holmes, keefe, lawson, lorimer, maupassant, nobody, plaintales, poe, torchy, wallingford and winesburg, each with its splitter and the hand-written groups and pages; catalogue v2 and v3; and the shared splitters gutenberg_chunks.py, se_split.py and se_build.py. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019rwKTmug58sEsJ72AuWsEi
111 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
111 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
# Poe reference set: *The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2* (tales)
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A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, the fourth beside O. Henry
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(`../v2/claude/`), Wharton (`../wharton/`) and Jacobs (`../jacobs/`). Claude wrote every summary,
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predicament, group and option here by reading the scenes. **No local or hosted inference was used.**
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Compare the local-model runs against it. It is not ground truth, just one careful reading.
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| File | What it is |
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| --- | --- |
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| `corpus/tales-vol2.txt` | Project Gutenberg #2148 (Raven Edition, vol. 2), plain text, public domain |
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| `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. |
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| `dump.py` | `python3 dump.py A B` prints scenes A..B for reading (copied from `../jacobs/`) |
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| `claude/batches/sNN.json` | per story: `{chunk, story, summary, predicament}`, the same schema as the sibling probes |
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| `claude/groups_src.py` | the groups, options and per-story protagonist standing |
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| `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. |
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| `claude/page.py` | → `claude/REFERENCE.html`, the readable page |
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Rebuild: `python3 split_gutenberg.py && cd claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py`.
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## What is in it
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- **369 predicaments**, one sentence each: median 20 words, range 15 to 24. They follow the
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`redescribe.py` rules, so there are no names, titles, places or story-only objects. The
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`topic_words` leak check flags 67 of 369. Most of those are role words (visitor 18, rival 13,
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host 7, guest 5, husband 4), kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles. The real leaks are
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place words: "house" 17, "room" 5, and "street", "boat" and "church" once each. Poe's situations
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are often *about* a house, so "house" usually belongs to the predicament rather than naming a
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setting.
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- **24 groups**, each a situation that recurs in **two or more stories**. Each scene sits in at most
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one group: 253 are assigned and **116 fit nothing that recurs**. The unassigned scenes are
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concentrated in a few tales, and that is a fact about Poe, not a gap in the reading. *Landor's
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Cottage* (17 of 17 unassigned) and most of *The Domain of Arnheim* (15 of 22) are landscape
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description with no predicament in them. So are the metaphysics of *Mesmeric Revelation* (8 of
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14), the Sinbad voyage inside *Scheherazade*, and the essay openings of *Von Kempelen*, *The
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Premature Burial* and *The Imp of the Perverse*. They were summarised anyway.
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- **Options**: 4 or 5 per group, 113 in all. 97 come from what someone in a scene did (`scene:N`),
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6 are archetypes and 10 fill gaps. **12 scene options cite a scene outside their own group**, and
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`groups.json` marks each one `in_group: false`. All 12 are within two scenes of a member in the same
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story (8 are the scene directly before or after), the same pattern the Wharton reference found.
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- **Moves**: spine paths with a direction only (`+`, `-`, `risk`, `set`). There are no magnitudes.
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Skill labels proposed for this corpus: **`nerve`**, holding steady under dread, and **`reason`**,
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keeping your head and thinking it through. `reason` covers the searcher in *The Purloined
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Letter*, the fisherman reading the whirlpool, and the prisoner working out the strap under the
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blade. Poe's heroes survive by that faculty far more often than by courage.
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- **Stage** comes from protagonist standing, judged **per story, not per scene**, and recorded in
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`STANDING` in `groups_src.py`. The corpus leans high: 9 of 22 tales have a noble or wealthy
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protagonist, so 14 of 24 groups land in the `high` stage.
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## Groups against the existing catalogue
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The 36-entry catalogue in `../catalogue/` is built from O. Henry, Wharton and Jacobs. Judged by
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reading, not by `classify.py`:
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- **Overlapping (5):** G16 *A sound in the night* is the catalogue's `dread` almost exactly. G22 *A
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fortune everyone is watching* is `after_your_money` / `strings`. G19 *Going to the bad* is close
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to `habit`. G15 *At the mercy of someone without pity* is a harsher `power_over_you`. G23 *Hidden
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in plain sight* shares ground with `cant_prove_it`.
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- **Partly overlapping (4):** G17 *A place that works on you* is a sharper `dread`: the thing to
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face is the place itself, and reasoning feeds the fear. G09 *A rival who is your mirror* is not
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the courtship `rival` but an equal who thinks your thoughts. G20 *A love you are not free to have*
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touches `rival` and `past_comes_back`. G03 *Hiding what you did* borders on `caught_out`.
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- **New (15):** G01 *The urge you cannot resist* (the perverse compulsion), G02 *Safe, and about to
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give yourself away*, G04 *Shut in the dark, and no one knows* (buried or sealed alive), G05 *The
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one you gave up for dead*, G06 *Death coming slowly, and one cool head*, G07 *Nobody will believe
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what you saw*, G08 *The reminder that will not go away* (guilt given a shape), G10 *A revenge they
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cannot escape*, G11 *Walled off from the danger outside*, G12 *A companion who may not be sane*,
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G13 *Sent for by a friend in a bad way*, G14 *Experimenting on the dying*, G18 *Your companion
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breaks*, G21 *Someone you love fading into a stranger*, G24 *A world of your own*.
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`dread` is the only existing entry this corpus lands on squarely. The Jacobs `dread` group means
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"something may be out there in the dark". Poe's material splits that into several sharper
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situations. In G01 and G02 the danger is inside you. In G04 and G05 it is someone being buried. In
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G08 it is your own guilt, and in G12 it is someone else's mind.
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## How this corpus differs
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- **The danger is usually internal.** The O. Henry, Wharton and Jacobs catalogue is social: rivals,
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secrets, money, scheming. In Poe the counterpart is often the protagonist's own compulsion
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(G01, G02), their conscience (G08), or their perception (G12, G16, G17). Actor, wants,
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counterpart still fits, but "counterpart" is often "the thing they are fixed on" or "the
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reminder", not a person. A pack built from these needs options that move `nerve` and `reason`
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far more than `relationships.*`.
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- **Groups are more concentrated.** With 22 tales that mostly run on a single obsession, many
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groups are one tale plus a few echoes. The top story takes 86% of G23 (*The Purloined Letter*),
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78% of G20, 77% of G09 (*William Wilson*), 75% of G11 (*The Masque of the Red Death*) and 71% of
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G14 (*Valdemar*). The Wharton rule of at most 50% from one story would cut 16 of the 24 groups.
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G06 has 19 scenes from only two tales, the whirlpool and the pit, because both are long, slow
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ordeals of the same shape.
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- **Some tales hold a group almost alone.** G07 *Nobody will believe what you saw* spans 6 tales,
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but 9 of its 15 scenes are the queen whose true wonders are dismissed as lies. They are all the
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same situation, so they are kept together, not trimmed to a quota.
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- **Several tales are not stories.** *Mesmeric Revelation* and *Von Kempelen* are mostly essay,
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and *Arnheim* and *Landor* are mostly description. They inflate the scene count without adding
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predicaments. A tool should expect a "no predicament here" answer for whole tales, not just for
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stray scenes.
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## Known defects
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- **The tail rule drops five endings.** The chunking rule discards a story's final paragraph run
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when it is under 80 words. Five tales lose their endings that way, all of them load-bearing: the
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rescue in *The Pit and the Pendulum* (66 words), the dying double's last words in *William
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Wilson* (66), the host found dead in *The Assignation* (61), the ghostly absolution in
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*Eleonora* (41) and the closing lines of *The Imp of the Perverse* (20). The rule is kept as
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specified so the probes stay comparable, but for this corpus it cuts the resolution of tales that
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end on a short, sharp paragraph. The summaries describe only what is in each scene.
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- **Four scenes are epigraphs or subtitles only**: 131, 196, 221 and 287, at 6 to 46 words. Each
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is an epigraph or subtitle followed by a paragraph long enough to start a new scene. They are
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kept so that `chunks.json` stays the corpus as split, and none is in a group.
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- Poe's footnote markers (`(*1)` and so on) are left in the text. The notes themselves are in the
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dropped end matter.
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