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An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker
- hshshshshsh 2y agoI don't know why people get obsessed over things like this. Finding significance in something because it's written by an entity whose name is popular makes no sense.
- cxr 2y agoValid take—your sense is that its adjacency to notoriety leads to people imbuing it with quality that they wouldn't if they were actually responding to quality and if it were J Random in the byline instead. It's the same thing that drives the rich-get-richer phenomenon. I remember thinking something similar when Facebook announced the Meta rebranding and people were atwitter about Zuckerberg's metaverse well past the point where it was clear that it was a dud—something that wouldn't have happened if there weren't a big name attached to it and people were responding purely to the merits.
- intalentive 2y ago"Honey, come look! I've found some information all the world's top historians missed."
- bell-cot 2y ago"missed" might be taken to imply that one or more of them had ever bothered to look.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoWell, even if people were looking, this sort of thing is a lot of right place and right time.
- bell-cot 2y agoTry skimming the Wikipedia articles on some major authors of that era, to get a sense for how much short (or serialized) fiction & poetry was routinely published in newspapers and magazines back then. Without some specific clues, a real historian would not be looking for Bram Stoker stories in an 1890 issue of the Daily Express Dublin Edition. He'd be skimming through the archives of many of the newspapers & magazines published in an era and geographic region, cataloging authors & stories & poems. "Success" would be just compiling a well-done catalog. 15 minutes of fame in the popular press could equally well result from finding some unknown early work by James Joyce, or Winston Churchill, or George Bernard Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, or Yeats, or ...
- jonhohle 2y agoI’ve found that it’s not uncommon for an interested individual to find details that have not been documented or “found” by others. I collect video games and have found variants of popular games that have been otherwise undocumented on any list or archive that I was aware of. I’ve found audio recordings from the 90s that seemingly have no recorded history on the internet. These aren’t things historians have had hundreds of years to document, but several thousand or more people have been on this space long before I was looking at it more intently than I could ever and I still come across things from time to time that weren’t known to exist. Likewise, in the past month I’ve spent an unfortunate amount of time reading laws and board bylaws and it doesn’t take long to find long forgotten rules that are being actively violated. Even outside of code, documentation is hard.
- cxr 2y agoTyler Cowen recently interviewed a historian (Alan Taylor), and they approached this subject near the end of the episode—how much the job of a historian still involves browsing undigitized material sitting on a shelf in a cold room somewhere. Around 3215 seconds* in: > And then there's also a kind of notion that everything is there online when in point of fact lots of information about the past still only exists in archives <https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alan-taylor/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alan-taylor/> * of the audio version, that is; at that timestamp in the YouTube video, they're discussing the question "How will large language models change historical research"—interviewee's response: he doesn't know
- bredren 2y agoThis happens often when going down the rabbit hole on a niche project. For example, repair and restoration of Persian rugs. There are many details to the craft that are hinted at in variety of formats, (youtube videos, blog entries, etc) but the clear truths are not clearly stated anywhere. These are stored in the minds and practices of artisans.
- javajosh 2y agoDoes the name "Bram Stoker" not carry any weight?
- slothtrop 2y agoInsofar as he's associated with "that Dracula story and movie", yes.
- adrianmonk 2y agoYes, but "Dracula author" carries more, and headlines aim to reach as many people as possible.
- WCSTombs 2y agoFor some reason his name is in the page's <head> but not in the article's title.
- dang 2y agoIt does here!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chachacharge 2y agoPro search tip- its Stoker not Stroker
- slothtrop 2y agoporn parody potential there
- mock-possum 2y agoAll this, and yet no link to read it?
- alanbernstein 2y agoIt's 134 years old but hasn't been published as a book yet, so surely it requires 100 years of copyright protection starting today!
- gwbas1c 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41905844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41905844
- unit149 2y agoUsed to be that writers were paid by the word and novels were serialized.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI’m concerned things like this will just be gone forever in the digital era. Paper and film are great storage mediums. I know this was on a screen but would it have still existed if it wasn’t on paper first?
- stavros 2y agoHard disks are great storage mediums when we don't purposely set fire to them to preserve the profits of large corporations. The Internet Archive is perfectly capable of preserving things, unless copyright holders manage to shut them down for short-term profit.
- echelon 2y agoIA shouldn't try to wage war against copyright. They should leave that to other entities. IA should be an archivist organization first and foremost and abandon the idea of making books, movies, and music publicly available. That's just painting a target on their back and risking their goal of preserving a snapshot of our time. The wayback machine is great, though, and they should keep doing that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhat are you referring to here? Hopefully not the secure destruction of hard disks.
- stavros 2y agoThe law's preference for 120 years of copyright instead of the preservation of culture. IA should be state-funded.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
- politelemon 2y agoYou can read it here: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000924296 https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000924296 Go full screen and go to page 2 it starts at about the middle.
- boilerupnc 2y agoEvolving Wikipedia Entry on the Story "Gibbet Hill" [0]. Plot Summary described on the page. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbet_Hill_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbet_Hill_(short_story)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nuz 2y agoSeems like a non pessimistic idea of something LLMs could help us out with. Mass analysis of old texts for new finds like this. If this one exists surely there are many more just a mass analysis away
- steve_adams_86 2y agoI accidentally got Zed to parse way more code than I intended last night and it cost close to $2 on the anthropic API. All I can think is how incredibly expensive it would be to feed an LLM text in hopes of making those connections. I don’t think you’re wrong, though. This is the territory where their ability to find patterns can feel pretty magical. It would cost many, many, many $2 though
- pcthrowaway 2y agoThis is a pretty good case for just using a local model. Even if it's 50% worse than Anthropic or whatever the gap is now between open models and proprietary state of the art, it's still likely 'good enough' to categorize a story in an old newspaper as missing from an author's known bibliography.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoGood point. I use llama3.1 for a lot of small tasks and rarely feel like I need to use Claude instead. It’s fine. I’m even running the model a (big) step down from 70b, because I’ve only got 32GB of ram. It’s a solid model that probably costs me next to nothing to run.
- diggan 2y ago> I accidentally got Zed to parse way more code than I intended last night and it cost close to $2 on the anthropic API Is that one API call or some out of control process slinging 100s of requests? Must have been a ton of data, as their most expensive model (Opus) seems to $15 per million input tokens. I guess if you just set it to use an entire project as the input, you'll hit 1m input tokens quickly.
- busyant 2y agoIt's funny (ironic?), but when I read "an amateur {insert occupation} has" I mentally replace "an amateur" with "a talented and passionate" For me, amateur just doesn't mean the insult that it meant when I was a youngster.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThe word 'amateur' originates from the Latin word for 'lover'.
- zanellato19 2y agoThank you! I've been using this word in portuguese (amador) and its so _so_ clear in that language, even so, I hadn't realized. Amar -> Amador (the one who loves it). Quite clearly.
- bombcar 2y agoExactly, and "professional" means they do it for money.
- otherme123 2y agoThe point is that "amateur" means literally "lover" in latin. While "professional" means "for money" today, in latin it meant "to profess a vow to do it with high standards". For example, you can be a professional, but do things "pro bono" (for free or for public good) or "pro lucro" (for money).
- retrac 2y ago"Vocation" has undergone a similar shift; originally it meant a calling, or a summons.
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- nu11ptr 2y agoHow would copyright law apply here? Would this fall into the public domain immediately? I read that Irish law is that it would be "70 years from date first made available to the public". Since published in a newspaper, I would assume this would be public domain now. Correct?
- cortesoft 2y agoYes, it's public domain
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 2y agoIf this was an unpublished manuscript, rights of first publication would apply and it might be covered by a kind of copyright that would vary depending on the country. Since this was "rediscovered" after first being unambiguously published back in the 1890s, it's pretty clearly in the public domain. OP got incredibly lucky though that the author's name was included in the original publication - things like this (i.e. contributions to newspapers or magazines) were often published under obscure pseudonyms, initials, puzzling hints like "By the author of Such-and-such" or no author indication at all.
- papercrane 2y agoI _think_ UK copyright law would matter here, since at the time the story was published (1890) the Ireland was part of the UK (Ireland gained independence in 1921.) If UK copyright applied, then the story would have entered public domain in 1932. The term of copyright for published works at the time as 7 years after the authors death, or 42 years, whichever was longer.
- Rebelgecko 2y agoFunnily enough there was a reddit post from around the time the manuscript was discovered (but before it was announced) asking a similar question
- deleted 2y ago
- mmastrac 2y agoI started a quick transcription here -- not enough time to complete more than half the first column, but some scans and very rough OCR are here if anyone is interested in contributing: https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill Top and bottom halves of the page in the repo here: https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-1.png https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-1.png https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-2.png https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-2.png EDIT: If you have access to a multi-modal LLM, the rough transcription + the column scan and the instruction to "OCR this text, keep linebreaks" gives a _very good_ result. EDIT 2: Rough draft, needs some proofreading and corrections: https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/story.md https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/story.md
- simonw 2y agoI tried extracting the content using Google Gemini 1.5 Pro 002 using https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/ - the first page (scan-2) worked fantastically well, the second page not so much. Here's what I got so far: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba87f507ef5c11d3335959c055533bee https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba87f507ef5c11d3335959c055533...
- mmastrac 2y agoI cropped the columns out into six files -- it might have an easier time with these: https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/col-1-a.png https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/col-1-a.pn...
- qmr 2y ago[dead]
- reaperducer 2y ago…and my wife's Halloween present has been printed. Tip: Load the pngs into Preview, hit "Auto Levels," and crank up "Sharpness" on each one. Looks pretty good!
- fauria 2y agoBrian Cleary will be discussing his findings next Saturday in Dublin, as part of the Bram Stoker Festival: https://bramstokerfestival.com/en/events/an-extraordinary-bram-stoker-discovery/ https://bramstokerfestival.com/en/events/an-extraordinary-br...
- ndileas 2y agoI don't mean to disparage this particular instance at all, as it seems pretty great. But I wonder if the rise of llms is going to make scams that sounds a lot like this much easier in the future. I think at the moment it's hard to make something really sound like a particular author without a lot of work, but that will probably change in the future.
- bredren 2y agoSure, people can do scams but it will be way more interesting to apply them to finding stuff like this. Up through now, literary treasures and open secrets are sitting out waiting to be recognized. And why bother with trying to deceive when one could build reputation for creating truly good fan fiction based off real source material. Just because tech can be used to abuse trust doesn't mean it will be the most interesting and commonly recognized thing to do with it.
- booleandilemma 2y agoI can see it now: "3 million lost works of Shakespeare found"
- 3D30497420 2y agoI imagine it will be a lot like other pieces of art where the provenance is really critical. If it cannot be traced properly back to the originator, then it will always be viewed as dubious. With that said, as a person largely ignorant of the field, I'd wager this is probably true now, irrespective the rise of LLMs.
- barrkel 2y agoLLMs tend not to volunteer information without the right prompting. The more you yourself know, the better use you can get out of an LLM, because you can steer it in profitable directions. This article could just as easily have been found by a text search on OCR'd microfilm, and it's hard to imagine a prompt that would be effective in bringing the article to light without already knowing it exists.
- ndileas 2y ago
- staticman2 2y agoI remember reading somewhere- I think it was in an annotated addition of Dracula, or maybe it was a journal article- that said that Bram Stoker wrote a large number of novels but everything he wrote other than Dracula was awful. Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.
- reaperducer 2y agoI suspect you're getting downvoted by people who haven't actually read anything by Stoker. My wife has read most of his stuff. I know because I buy it for her. She says aside from Dracula, most of it is not great.
- timeinput 2y agoFor me it feels like Stokers dracula is only so popular because it's where all the tropes come from, not because it's particularly well written, or something like that. It's one of those firsts that established a genre. I know Stoker didn't invent vampires, but they came into western English speaking culture through his Dracula.
- nu11ptr 2y agoI am not a literary critic, but I very much enjoyed Dracula. When I read it, I did not know there were claims he wasn't a good writer, so I had no bias, I simply liked it quite a bit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- staticman2 2y agoI don't know, Stroker does some interesting stuff in Dracula, essentially it's this Victorian hysterical story about extramarital or premarital sex "ruining" women (in this cases, essentially turning them into undead monsters as an extended metaphor for a woman's reputation being ruined in victorian society) as the cuckolded Victorian gentleman look in horror until they figure out the source of the trouble-- a no good foreigner. There's also a sub-theme of the too secular modern men who don't believe in superstition (Jonathan Harker doesn't believe in vampires in the beginning) needing to get in better touch with Christianity to defeat Dracula- and features a rejection of secular psychiatry to defeat what turns out to not be "mental illness" way before The Exorcist did it.
- sleepytimetea 2y agoThe discovery happened because the amateur historian suffered a sudden loss of hearing and took leave from his job to go browse the archives in Dublin. A special Christmas supplement to the regular newspaper from 1890 and he decided to just browse it for fun ? Serendipitous.
- bredren 2y agoThe funds from publishing also going to an org focused on those who suffer hearing loss—-which is for Stoker’s mother who was a hearing loss campaigner. I also wondered if he was tipped off.
- karaterobot 2y agoWell, he lived in Dublin, where Stoker lived, and I'd bet the library he visited had a special Stoker collection that might have attracted a fan. There's also the fact that Stoker's mother Charlotte helped open state schools for deaf children; so there may have been some connection there, too. But yeah, on such strange coincidences many discoveries rest. It's interesting how much you can find just by reading old newspapers and magazines. Everybody just reads Wikipedia now, even journalists, so it's become basically the sole source of truth. If it's not in there, it's not on record. But if you scratch the surface just a little bit, you find tidbits that are only mentioned on places like ancient newsgroup threads, or sometimes not mentioned at all on the public web. Libraries, man!
- sam345 2y agoStoker's Dracula is one of my all-time favorite books. I may now just read it again. My only regret in reading the last time was reading the modern take in the forward.
- Exoristos 2y agoModern liberal-arts academics is a process of taking what you love and learning how to hate it.
- pookha 2y agoAcademics are fully capable of taking history (or physics) and putting it into a wood chipper feet first if it doesn't fit squarely into whatever system they're absorbed into. Mao's useful-idiot student protestors decimated the great wall of china because it was "old". Literally tore down hundreds of kilometers. And when they weren't going to town on the Great Wall of China they were pushing bogus physics because the Big Bang theory was bourgeoisie.
- paulette449 2y agoI have just finished reading Carmilla [1], a vampire novella by another Irishman, Sheridan LeFanu, which pre-dated Dracula by 25 years. I much preferred it to Stoker's book. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla
- barrkel 2y agoIt's fantastic to look at an old newspaper from those times. Such an abundance and density of reading material.
- m3kw9 2y agoWhat’s the review on this short story? Out of 5 stars.
- joelignaatius 2y ago[dead]
- ruthrohrer 2y ago[dead]
- rothos 2y agoIt's the BBC -- why don't they denote the title of a short story with quotations? It's written throughout without any quotes.
- vagab0nd 2y agoHow is it possible that the text has just been sitting there, unparsed, for however long since it was digitized?