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
151 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
151 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
# Winesburg reference set: *Winesburg, Ohio* (1919)
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A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, a sibling of the Jacobs set in
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`../jacobs/` and the Bierce set in `../bierce/`. Claude read every scene and wrote each summary,
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predicament, group and option. **No local inference was used.** Compare the local-model runs against it.
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Do not treat it as ground truth: it is one careful reading.
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| File | What it is |
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| --- | --- |
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| `corpus/winesburg-ohio.html` | Standard Ebooks single-page text of Sherwood Anderson's *Winesburg, Ohio* (public domain) |
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| `../se_build.py` | → `stories.json` (24 stories, split on the `se:short-story` markup) and `chunks.json` (284 scenes, same 320-word paragraph rule as `../chunk.py`) |
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| `claude/batches/sNN.json` | per story: `{chunk, story, summary, predicament}`, the same schema as `../jacobs/claude/batches/` |
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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` (unchanged from Jacobs: it resolves paths relative to itself) |
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| `claude/page.py` | → `claude/REFERENCE.html`, the readable page |
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Rebuild: `python3 ../se_build.py . "Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson, 1919)" && cd claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py`
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(run from this directory). The split was made once and is not redone here.
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## What is in it
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- **284 predicaments**: one sentence each (median 21 words, min 16, max 24), written to the
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`redescribe.py` rules: no names, jobs, places or story-only objects. The `topic_words` leak check
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flags 48 of 284. 47 are role or kin words (son, mother, wife, father, newcomer, suitor, admirer,
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rival), kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles. The other is "court" used as a verb.
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A second pass took "town" and "city" out of 26 predicaments, and "room" or "house" out of 3 more,
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where they tied a situation to the setting. Each should now read as well in an office or a
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freight yard ("everyone around them", "somewhere bigger").
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- **19 groups**, each a situation that recurs in **three or more stories** (3 span 4, 5 span 5,
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2 span 6, 5 span 7, 2 span 8, 2 span 9). Every group has at least 6 scenes, and no story supplies more than
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half of any group's members (the largest share is 43%). **All 19 pass the catalogue's recurrence rule**
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(≥ 5 scenes, ≥ 3 stories, no story over 50%). Each scene sits in at most one group: **163 are
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assigned and 121 fit nothing that recurs**. All 24 stories feed at least one group.
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- **Options**: 3 to 5 per group, 93 in all (17 groups have 5, 2 have 4). 81 come from what
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someone in a scene did or refused to do (`scene:N`), 6 are archetypes and 6 fill gaps. **27
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scene options cite a scene outside their own group.** That is looser than DESIGN.md's "drawn from
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other scenes in the cluster", and `groups.json` marks each one `in_group: false`. 17 of the 27
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are the scene just before or after a member, where the character acts on the predicament the
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member scene sets up.
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- **Moves**: spine paths with a direction only (`+`, `-`, `risk`, `set`). There are no magnitudes,
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as the design requires. Relationship paths are moved 78 times, `standing` 38, flags 26, the two
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skills 17 each and `money` only 12. Relationship roles are generic (`family`, `child`, `spouse`,
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`beloved`, `confidant`, `elder`, `community`, `absent`, `rival`, `peers`, `close`, `friend`).
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Flags record what the player did (`left_home`, `confessed`, `kept_silent`, `fled_closeness`,
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`secret_savings`, `false_front`, `broke_out`).
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- **Skills** proposed for this corpus: `voice`, for daring to say what you mean, and `insight`, for
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reading what people feel under what they say. Neither Jacobs' `cunning` nor Bierce's `nerve` fits:
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almost nobody here schemes or faces danger, and nearly every predicament turns on speaking or
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understanding. A pack from this corpus would test whether the numeric search can make two
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communication skills carry what money carries elsewhere.
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- **Stage** comes from protagonist standing, judged **per story, not per scene**, in `STANDING` in
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`groups_src.py`. A day labourer, a shop clerk, a demoted operator, a neglected child, a recluse,
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a failing shopkeeper's son, a farm hand and a stable boy rank low. The young reporter, his mother,
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the town's odd professionals and a teacher rank middle. The valley's great landowner, his daughter
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and grandson, and the best-paid pastor rank high. The groups come out 11 middle, 5 low and 3 high.
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## Against the existing catalogue (82 entries, v2)
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**Eight groups match an existing entry.** Seven of them widen or sharpen it rather than duplicate it:
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- **G09 the thing you cannot get out → `unspoken`**, widened. The entry is shy lovers. Here it is
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also a mother and son who sit together every evening and say nothing real, a boy who cannot tell
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his friends what his painting means, a young man who calls someone out to confront him and freezes,
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and a mother dying paralysed while trying to speak of her son's future. The entry's definition
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("someone you want is waiting for you to say it") could drop "want": the listener need not be a lover.
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- **G11 on the edge of everyone else's life → `outside_looking_in`**, sharpened. The entry is a lit
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window seen from outside. Winesburg puts the outsider in the middle of the crowd, at the county
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fair, among arguing men or among talking artists, and still outside it.
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- **G12 waiting for someone who may never come → `waiting`**, widened: waiting on someone who has
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already forgotten you, and the moment of saying aloud that it is not coming.
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- **G13 alone so long your habits have become your company → `isolation`**, widened. The entry is
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lost or posted somewhere empty. Here the solitude is chosen, in the middle of town, and the danger
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is that invented company and small rituals replace people.
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- **G16 a desire at war with who you mean to be → `self_betrayal`**, sharpened: a respectable person
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returning to a temptation while telling himself it is a test.
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- **G17 someone else wants the one you want → `rival`**, unchanged.
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- **G18 acting bigger than you feel → `pretence`**, widened from pretending to a station to young
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bravado: boasting of future greatness, talking worldly among peers, playing the solid citizen.
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- **G19 unseen at home → `home_unseen`**, widened from spouses to parent and child: a son whose mother
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favours his cruel brother, a child whose father is busy arguing against God.
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**Eleven groups are new situation types** (the brief's seven targets are marked ★):
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- ★ **G01 whether to leave for somewhere bigger.** `newcomer` is arriving and `homecoming` is word
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from home. Neither is the decision to go. This is the book's spine: it recurs in 8 stories and ends
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the book.
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- ★ **G02 telling it all to the one who will listen.** A lonely person finally tells a life story
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to a single listener, usually the young reporter. It is not `owning_up` (no wrong is confessed to
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the wronged) and not `grief` (the entry is a loss nobody will hear; here someone does).
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- **G03 an elder presses their hard lesson on you.** Seen from the young person's side: take it,
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humour it or refuse it. It recurs in 8 stories and is the other half of G02.
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- ★ **G04 one idea has taken over your life.** This is Anderson's "grotesque" from the prologue: a
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man who seized one truth and became warped by it.
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- ★ **G05 your child's chances are the life you never had.** Closest is `family_against_your_path`,
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but there the parent opposes the child's life. Here the parent is living through it.
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- ★ **G06 the one everyone watches.** Being the town's odd one. `despised` is the nearest entry, but
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its decision is whether to help when given a chance. This one is how to live under the stares.
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- ★ **G07 what they say about you is not who you are.** A public reputation against a private life.
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It sits between `wrongly_judged` and `pretence` and matches neither: the story people tell may be
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admiring as well as damning, and the player did not invent it.
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- ★ **G08 reaching out, then pulling back.** A moment of connection that fails. It differs from
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`unspoken`: the person does reach out, and then recoils, turns harsh or drives the other away.
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- **G10 understood without a word**: the rare moment of connection that holds, the success case of G08.
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- **G14 the life you settled into**: a marriage or life taken because it was at hand, felt years later
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as a harness. Nearest are `dead_end` (thankless work, the temptation to stop wanting) and
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`home_unseen`. The decision here is to break out, stay, or keep a secret way out.
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- **G15 the urge to break out, now**: a sudden impulse to run out into the night or the storm. It
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recurs in 7 stories, one scene each.
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## How this corpus differs from Jacobs and Bierce
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**It is the design's target corpus: one town, 24 stories, many lives.** The same streets, the hotel,
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the newspaper office and the fairground recur in every story, and the young reporter passes through
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most of them. That shows in recurrence: 9 of 19 groups span 7 or more stories, against a maximum of
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6 in Bierce. But it also means that "which story" and "which situation" are harder to separate than
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in a mixed collection: scene text shares names, places and a narrator voice across all 24 stories. A
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tool that clusters on scene prose will pull the town together, not the situations.
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**The register is inward and the stakes are small.** Nobody is in danger and almost nobody schemes.
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The predicaments are about saying, hearing, leaving and being seen. That is why `money` moves only 12
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times and relationships carry the moves. It is also why the brief's targets all exist here, several
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of them in 7 to 9 stories.
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**The listener problem.** A great many scenes are one person talking while the reporter listens. In
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each such scene the decision belongs to the talker, not the listener. G02 and G03 split this by side:
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G02 is the talker's predicament and G03 the listener's. Scenes where the reporter only witnesses
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(the Kings coming to threaten a suitor, the pastor bursting in with a bleeding fist) are unassigned.
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**The prologue.** *The Book of the Grotesque* (story 0, 4 scenes) grouped as expected for a framing
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piece: only its statement of the theory, scene 3, fits a recurring situation (G04, one idea has taken
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over your life). Its other three scenes are an old writer's reverie and stay unassigned. The prologue
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names the book's theme and supplies one example of it, not a situation of its own.
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**Godliness is one tale in four parts.** Stories 6, 7 and 8 (*Godliness* I–II, *Surrender*, *Terror*)
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are one family's story. Every group still spans three or more stories if those three count as one;
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G05 falls from 5 stories to 4 and G04, G19 from 7 and 6 to 6 and 5. The long historical narration of
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the tale (scenes 47–50, 57) and the grandfather's two woodland rites (73–77, 93–98) are one-story
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material and stay unassigned.
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**Why 121 scenes are unassigned.** Besides the above, most are scene-setting narration (the spring
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woods, the empty fairground at night, the snowbound town), or single-story episodes with no second
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instance. Examples are the schoolmaster's false accusation and flight in *Hands*, the Kings'
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visit, the wife pushed naked into the parlour in *Respectability*, and the travelling salesman
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driven off at gunpoint in *"Queer"*.
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## Known defects
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- The Standard Ebooks part headings stay inline in scene text: scene 47 begins "A Tale in Four Parts",
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scene 78 "Part III" and scene 91 "Part IV". They are not removed, so that `chunks.json` stays the
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corpus as split.
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