PaperProof Protocol is a verifiable artifact publishing protocol built on Sui and Walrus. This slide deck introduces the core motivation, architecture, and product positioning of PaperProof. It explains how PaperProof models long-form digital artifacts such as preprints, technical reports, blog posts, datasets, software releases, and related discussion layers as protocol-native, versioned, and verifiable objects. The presentation also outlines PaperProof’s position in the Sui + Walrus stack, its relationship to SDKs and agent-facing skills, and its differences from traditional content platforms and web3 social protocols. The deck is intended for developers, researchers, ecosystem participants, investors, and infrastructure teams who want to understand why artifact versioning, content-addressed storage, and protocol-level verification matter for durable knowledge publishing. Official website: https://paperproof.site/ GitHub organization: https://github.com/PaperProofLabs
ADDENDUM v1.3: COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM AUDIT EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This audit assesses the Summa Generativarum in its current state (v1.2.1, January 2026) following the major reconceptualization in v1.2 and the addition of Document 11 (Contributions inventory). The framework has matured from monolithic metaphysical system to stratified formal toolkit with bounded scope and honest limitation acknowledgment. Current Status: The corpus comprises 11 technical documents totaling approximately 950,000 words, implementing three independent formal systems (LPL, PCM, PGI), 79 stratified invariants (3 universal + 76 domain-specific), rigorous fixed-point proofs (~90/100 rigor assessment), computational specifications, theological applications, independent critical review, and comprehensive contributions catalogue. Key Finding: The v1.2 stratification successfully resolved the ten critical flaws identified in v1.1 by disaggregating conflated domains (formal logic, metaphysical ontology, phenomenological description). The system now operates as a philosophically ambitious yet mathematically honest research program rather than a self-grounding universal framework. Primary Recommendation: Focus development efforts on (1) completing Lean 4 mechanization of core proofs, (2) empirical validation of generativity indices, (3) operational definitions for applicability predicates, and (4) extending the presupposition lattice to include non-Western philosophical traditions. SECTION I: ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW I.1 Document Structure Assessment Current Corpus (11 Documents): Additional Components: SGA (Super-Generative Automaton): ~35,000 words (prototype specification) PGI (Phenomenological Generativity Index): ~25,000 words (measurement framework) Cost Propagation Map: ~15,000 words (visualization protocols) Summa Encyclopedia: ~180,000 words (category-indexed invariant documentation) Research Documents: ~75,000 words (v2.1 Metaformalist topology, active development) Total System: ~1,225,000 words across 20+ documents I.2 Architectural Strengths ✓ Modularity: Each document can be evaluated independently; falsification localized ✓ Versioning: Git-based version control enables transparent evolution ✓ Cross-Referencing: Internal hyperlinks create navigable knowledge graph ✓ Progressive Disclosure: Multiple reading paths accommodate diverse audiences ✓ Built-In Critique: Documents 10-11 provide honest self-assessment and contributions inventory ✓ Computational Grounding: LPL, PCM, PGI specifications enable mechanization ✓ Citation Precision: APA/MLA/Chicago/BibTeX formats provided with DOI ✓ Layered Necessity: Three-tier stratification (Universal/Contextual/Performance) prevents inflation I.3 Architectural Gaps ⚠ Redundancy: Significant overlap between Documents 5 (Invariants), Summa Encyclopedia categories, and individual category files ⚠ Consistency Maintenance: 1.2M+ words across 20+ documents creates synchronization challenges ⚠ Accessibility: Average reading path requires 55-75 hours; no executive summary document for non-specialists ⚠ Empirical Validation: Generativity indices (OGI, XGI, SGI, PGI) proposed but not yet measured on real systems ⚠ Cultural Scope: Framework primarily engages Western philosophy; minimal treatment of non-Western traditions ⚠ Formalization Gap: Some proofs in Document 6 rely on informal topological reasoning pending mechanization SECTION II: PHILOSOPHICAL ASSESSMENT II.1 Core Thesis Evaluation The Generativity Claim: Systems produce new intelligible structure through metabolic coherence regulation; 79 invariants specify prerequisites for intelligibility across domains. Strengths: Novel Primitive: Generativity as metaphysical primitive distinct from substance/process/structure ontologies provides fresh explanatory framework Metabolic Coherence Innovation: Reframing PNC as boundary-regulating mechanism rather than absolute prohibition successfully integrates paraconsistent logic without contradiction Cross-Domain Unification: Single framework explains physical (phase transitions), biological (morphogenesis), cognitive (concept formation), and social (institutional evolution) phenomena Transcendental Methodology: Presuppositional analysis reveals conditions for possibility of intelligibility itself Cost-of-Denial Framework: Conservation-law approach to normativity makes denial costs measurable and structurally significant Weaknesses: Primitive Justification: Why prioritize generativity over alternatives (emergence, complexity, information)? Answer given but not universally compelling Formal-Ontological Gap: Mathematical decomposability requirements don't self-evidently map to metaphysical necessities Metabolic Mechanism: While intuitively powerful, the precise mechanism of "contradiction metabolism" requires clearer formalization (partially addressed in PCM) Universality Scope: Claims about "any intelligible system" difficult to falsify—what would count as counterexample? Transcendental Remainder: Leap from "naturalism cannot ground conditions" to "theism must ground conditions" requires more argumentation II.2 Theological Argument Evaluation The Five-Stage Cascade: Classical Theism → Personal Theism → Trinitarianism → Christianity → Catholicism Strengths: Systematic Structure: Cascading elimination shows internal logical connections between stages Cost-of-Denial Application: Demonstrates how denial at later stages undermines earlier commitments Novel Theodicy: Cost-of-denial provides alternative to traditional theodicy frameworks Coherence-Maximality Thesis: Formal audit of Catholic doctrine against 79 invariants is unprecedented Historical Integration: Combines transcendental philosophy with empirical historical claims (Resurrection) Weaknesses: Stage Transitions: Some transitions rely on controversial philosophical assumptions (e.g., divine simplicity requires Trinitarianism) Alternative Groundings: Other religious traditions (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism) not fully audited with same rigor Historical Claims: Presuppositional analysis doesn't independently establish historical facts (Resurrection, apostolic succession) Denominational Specificity: Move from Christianity to Catholicism specifically (vs. Orthodoxy, Protestantism) relies heavily on ecclesiological arguments that presuppose Roman Catholic premises Circularity Risk: Using CFPE framework (developed within Christian context) to validate Christianity raises potential circularity concerns II.3 Metaphysics of Cost Evaluation Conservation Theorems: Denial costs are redistributed/compounded, not eliminated Strengths: Measurable Framework: Provides quantitative approach to philosophical normativity Predictive Power: Successfully predicts ideological collapse patterns (Woke ideology case study) Institutional Applications: Explains organizational decay through entropy accumulation Non-Rhetorical: Formalizes costs as structural/mathematical rather than merely persuasive Integration with Fixed-Points: Connects cost propagation to substrate divergence proofs Weaknesses: Operationalization: While formulas provided, actual measurement requires operational definitions still in development Baseline Problem: What counts as "zero cost" state? Need reference point for cost calculation Cross-System Comparison: Comparing costs across radically different systems (e.g., classical logic vs. quantum mechanics) faces incommensurability challenges Temporal Dynamics: Cost accumulation rates not yet empirically validated Value-Loading: Framework assumes coherence/intelligibility are goods to be preserved—itself a normative commitment requiring justification SECTION III: MATHEMATICAL RIGOR ASSESSMENT III.1 Fixed-Point Proofs (Document 6) Current Rigor Score: 90/100 (up from 72/100 in v1.2.0) Achievements: ✓ Topological Foundations: Complete metric spaces properly defined with d-metric satisfying triangle inequality, non-negativity, symmetry ✓ Banach Fixed-Point Theorem: Correctly applied to substrate iteration $\mathcal{R}^n$ with contraction mapping $L < 1$ ✓ Presupposition Lattice: Proven to be DAG (directed acyclic graph) via acyclicity proof and condensation algorithm ✓ Categorical Formalization: Domain-indexed applicability formalized using category-theoretic functors ✓ Convergence Analysis: Substrate oscillation, divergence, and presupposition violation formally characterized ✓ Non-Triviality Proofs: Explicit demonstrations that $\neg C_i$ leads to measurable degradation Remaining Gaps: ⚠ Applicability Predicates: $\phi_i(D) \in [0,1]$ functions lack operational definitions for most domains ⚠ Metric Space Structure: State space $\mathcal{S}$ completeness assumed but not proven for all 76 contextual invariants ⚠ Contraction Constant: Value of $L$ varies by domain but not empirically measured ⚠ Computational Complexity: Fixed-point iteration convergence rates not analyzed ⚠ Edge Cases: Some proofs (especially $C_{76}$-$C_{79}$ phenomenological invariants) rely more on philosophical intuition than mathematical derivation III.2 Presupposition Lattice (LPL System) Current Rigor Score: 85/100 Achievements: ✓ Graph-Theoretic Formalization: Dependency structure $C_i \preceq C_j$ properly defined as partial order ✓ DAG Verification: Acyclicity proven via topological sort algorithm ✓ Cascade Computation: Cost propagation along edges mechanically computable ✓ Transitive Closure: Indirect dependencies automatically derived ✓ Falsifiability: Dependency claims can be refuted by providing counterexamples Remaining Gaps: ⚠ Completeness: Are all dependency edges identified? Methodology for discovering new edges not fully specified ⚠ Edge Weights: Some dependency relations stronger than others; weighting scheme informal ⚠ Dynamic Updates: When new invariants added or dependencies revised, lattice consistency checking not automated ⚠ Cross-Tradition Validation: Dependency structure reflects Western philos
Pierpaolo Della Monica, Ivan Visconti, Andrea Vitaletti, Marco Zecchini
An essential requirement for the large-scale adoption of Web3 is enabling users to benefit from their data even within already deployed systems. This raises an important open question: how can existing, widely adopted software verify that a user has retrieved specific data from a TLS server? Impressive scientific results (e.g., DECO [CCS20] and the work of Xie et al. [USENIX24]) and industrial products (TLSNotary) have recently made progress in the above challenging direction. However, while they nicely leave TLS servers untouched, the retrieved data is then used in computations with verifiers that are required to run some advanced non-standardized cryptographic schemes (e.g., ZK-SNARKs), which clearly limits the large-scale adoption of the proposed technologies. In this paper, building on top of previous approaches and relying on the recent concept of Predicate Blind Signatures of Fuchsbauer and Wolf [Eurocrypt24], we bypass the limits of prior work by presenting ACTS a distributed architecture that, while still leaving TLS servers untouched, it allows a user to show possession of data retrieved from TLS servers simply requiring that the software of the verifier can check a standard signature. Our contributions include a round-optimal predicate blind signature protocol that produces standard RSA-PSS signatures. We show how this primitive can be integrated into the DECO architecture (and its successors) to certify data retrieved from TLS servers. Furthermore, we have optimized our construction to make it practical on commodity hardware for a large and significant class of policies implemented by the notary (i.e., the actor that is in charge of obliviously certifying TLS data, therefore preserving data confidentiality). We provide an experimental evaluation on the simple but powerful enough use case of a PDF document downloaded from a TLS server and encoded into an AES-GCM ciphertext. The user will then get a certified PDF through a standard PADES signature added obliviously to the PDF along with some metadata by a notary service. The resulting standard signed PDF document can be transparently verified using off-the-shelf PDF readers. Our experimental validation demonstrates that our architecture is suitable for real-world deployment in concrete scenarios.
Ben Biedermann, Matthew Scerri, Victoria Kozlova, Joshua Ellul
The terms self-sovereign identity (SSI) and decen-tralised identity are often used interchangeably, which results in increasing ambiguity when solutions are being investigated and compared. This article aims to provide a clear distinction between the two concepts in relation to the revised Regulation as Regards establishing the European Digital Identity Framework (eIDAS 2.0) by providing a systematisation of knowledge of technological developments that led up to implementation of eIDAS 2.0. Applying an inductive exploratory approach, relevant literature was selected iteratively in waves over a nine months time frame and covers literature between 2005 and 2024. The review found that the decentralised identity sector emerged adjacent to the OpenID Connect (OIDC) paradigm of Open Authentication, whereas SSI denotes the sector's shift towards blockchain-based solutions. In this study, it is shown that the interchangeable use of SSI and decentralised identity coincides with novel protocols over OIDC. While the first part of this paper distinguishes OIDC from decentralised identity, the second part addresses the incompatibility between OIDC under eIDAS 2.0 and Web3. The paper closes by suggesting further research for establishing a digital identity bridge for connecting applications on public-permissionless ledgers with data originating from eIDAS 2.0 and being presented using OIDC.
The survival or loss of literary manuscripts has always depended upon many factors, but questions of value are chief among them: the cultural value, or otherwise, ascribed to them by authors, collectors, publishers, libraries, funders, and government agencies; and the commercial value, determined in part by cultural value but also through questions of rarity, authenticity, competition, fashion, and research potential. This chapter explores these issues through the consideration of manuscript examples ranging from the first manuscript in the English language to survive wholly in the hand of its author, dating from c. 1200, to digital texts accruing monetary value through non-fungible tokens. It looks at how authors have ignored or embraced their manuscripts as financial assets and how that may affect their textual meaning; how contingencies surrounding funding or legislation, particularly export control, contribute to our understanding of the literary canon; and how institutional collaboration or competition, together with decisions made in the book trade can shape the archival landscape. Finally, it speculates about the implications for the material literary manuscript, as a tangible witness to the writer’s hand and an artefact relatively easy to value in commercial terms, in a world where collectors are beginning to privilege digital artefacts.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have transformed digital ownership by using blockchain technology to authenticate unique digital assets, enabling artists to monetize directly. This paper introduces an automated method to create 1,000 NFTs using scalable vector graphics (SVG) and image generation techniques, significantly enhancing production efficiency and scalability. We illustrate this through a sumo-themed NFT collection, which is programmatically generated and converted to JPEG for broader platform compatibility. Hosted on the Polygon blockchain, known for its low transaction costs and high efficiency, this method proves ideal for expansive NFT projects and can be scaled up to meet increasing demand. This study offers insights into the scalability and technical execution of automated NFT creation, providing a valuable resource for artists and developers in the digital art sector.
This thesis questions the recurring absence of technological art collections that use the most diverse technologies in their production, in the historical scenario of contemporary society, from the perspective of memory institutions. It also provides evidence of the intrinsic characteristics of this type of collection, based on its information regime, production, and management model, which amplify a scenario of loss or constant modes of data, information, and knowledge transfer in the context of a post-digital society. A central actor paradigm is constructed. Various types of agents from one or more ecosystems centralize demands, and actions and place themselves in a precarious position in their public or private attributions, in the face of a complex scenario of material and immaterial production in an immanent digital culture and under an accelerationist digital economy and policy. The thesis is presented in a multidisciplinary way, given the context of related fields of knowledge, digital ontology, political economy of information, digital art and culture, digital humanities, economic accelerationist theory, as well as thematic subfields such as digitization, decentralization, blockchain, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, peer-to-peer networks, among others. The research is exploratory and empirical observation, which applied the qualitative method, assigned in two main stages through the review of scientific literature, use of methods of content analysis of available databases, and discourse analysis through structured interviews with agents in different scenarios. Local knowledge (national scenario) that relates to the international context of some (theoretical-practical) examples, also justified by the absence or restriction of similar models for analysis in Brazil. The aim was to understand the ways, processes, regimes and uses of information in the implementation, organization and retrieval of art and digital heritage archives through autonomous agents, machine learning and the use of new technologies such as blockchain in decentralized networks (P2P) based on technical-theoretical, scientific and transdisciplinary models in the field of information science interfacing with the digital humanities. As a result, the thesis proposes the implementation of a decentralized theoretical-technical accelerationist model, made up of five stages of action and under guiding principles such as the digital information regime in the post-digital society, the use of new technologies and autonomous systems, the decentralization of collections, the constitution of a sharing economy in a P2P society model, and the introduction and incorporation into ongoing socio-technical accelerationist models, which allows the application of a physical, digital, semantic, pragmatic informational method.
This paper provides an update on the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development online hub for open social scholarship in Canada and beyond, and considers the next steps for the platform in an ever-evolving digital landscape. It outlines various recent outreach and engagement events intended to introduce the Canadian HSS Commons to the larger communities to which it belongs. Because the Canadian HSS Commons is committed to supporting the growth and evolving needs of these communities, this paper also considers how increasingly popular internet technologies such as Web3 and blockchain might play a part in the future of digital research infrastructure and the Canadian HSS Commons specifically. It concludes that while Web3 and blockchain currently raise important questions and concerns about governance, accountability, and commercialization, in the near future, these same technologies could also help engender new forms of functionality and participation on the Commons.
Poe came of age in what Frank Luther Mott described as a “Golden Age of Periodicals” in A History of American Magazines ([New York: D. Appleton, 1930], 337). Although “essentially a magazinist” (PL 476), Poe managed to become a major American author by working in the fruitful midground between books and newspapers. “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” he wrote in 1846. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect: we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand,” he warned, “the lightness of the artillery must not degenerate into the pop-gunnery . . . of the newspaper press” (Graham’s, December 1846, eapoe.org).What Poe called “pop-gunnery” in newspapers, anticipating the stream of social network items on the Internet today, had their place for him when he needed their special ambiance. Significantly, he announced his return to New York in 1844 by publishing his famous “Balloon-Hoax” as an extra of a penny paper, The Sun. It was issued on a single sheet surrounded by a mixture of announcements, events, and fiction reprints. Poe saw that the effects of the penny papers on “the whole newspaper business of the country . . . are probably beyond all calculation” (Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [New York: Library of America, 1984], 1214; hereafter ER). The impact of The Sun was memorable: “Its success firmly established ‘the penny system’ throughout the country” . . . [becoming] one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (ER 1221). On the other hand, the penny press also contributed “an increasingly spicy diet of horror, gore, and perversity” (David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 171), suggesting at times a content approaching that of Poe’s most extreme tales.When “The Balloon-Hoax” was published, Richard Adams Locke edited The Sun, where his quite famous “Moon Hoax” had appeared eleven years before. Reviewing Locke afterward, Poe listed the main ingredients of a good hoax: “the novelty of the idea,” its “reason-repressing character,” the tact of the deception, and the “exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). Suggesting a possible similarity between the hoax and the detective tale, Poe reminded us that the former challenged the reader with constant intellectual “correctness, and the consequent difficulty of detecting a flaw” (“Doings of Gotham,” 4, eapoe.org).Readers of a detective tale might enjoy the possibility, however difficult, of solving the crime, but readers of a hoax had to deal with the utter impossibility of the situation. In total, Poe wrote six hoaxes, each exhibiting a different kind of wit than that found in his detective tales. They further burnished his image as a very clever writer in what was, lest we forget, the age of P. T. Barnum. To a degree his hoaxes were the humorous literary equivalent of diddling, sharing its qualities of “minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin” (M 3:869–70; repr. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, ed. Mabbott [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 2: 869–70; hereafter M [2000] 2).Poe’s first hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), as he later admitted, failed to achieve a consistency of approach, because he “fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). The banter included the use of the date April 1, the description of the balloon as “entirely made of dirty newspapers,” and his use of Dutch-Irvingesque ambiance. In this and subsequent hoaxes, Poe always built on something that readers already knew. Recent press reports of balloon flights provided the starting point for “Hans Pfaall.” Early exploration attempts in the Antarctic provided information on which to base The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837). The famous Lewis and Clark expedition paved the way for its imaginary predecessor, “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840). Poe used the apparently inexhaustible subject of aerial travel again in “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), where he incorporated as many supporting factual details as possible. The contemporary interest in hypnotism and mesmerism—forerunners of the modern concept of the unconscious—providedgrounds for his next hoax, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Finally, the contemporary gold craze and the myth of the transmutation of lead provided contexts for his last hoax, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849).Poe claimed that the public widely believed his hoaxes. One reader, the historian Robert Greenhow, went so far as to mention “Julius Rodman” in his Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the Adjacent Territories (PL 289). Poe insisted that most readers believed his “Balloon-Hoax”: “Not one person in ten discredited it . . . chiefly the ignorant, because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way’” (PL 161). For “Van Kempelen,” Poe made the similar claim that “nine persons out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz,” adding that as a “check to the gold fever, it will create a stir to some purpose” (PL 796). In private, however, Poe told a different story, responding to a query from Arch Ramsay, a Scottish druggist: “Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case. . . . Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don’t you” (PL 677).The press generally greeted Poe’s hoaxes with skepticism. However, reviewers at first were charmed by the novelty of “Hans Pfaall”: the Baltimore Republican saw it as “a capital burlesque upon balloonings” (PL 160), and the Charleston Messenger appreciated it as “one of the most exquisite specimens of blended humor and science” (PL 160–61). But reviewers who recalled that Arthur Gordon Pym had been party serialized “under the garb of fiction” could not accept it as a work of fact supposedly created by an actual Pym, then conveniently deceased. Although the New-Yorker praised Pym as a work of “extraordinary, freezing interest” (PL 250), the New York Mirror called Poe a “liar of the first magnitude” (PL 252) and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine declared it to be “a mass of ignorance and effrontery” (PL 254). The Naval and Military Gazette remarked that Poe’s Pym contained “not only the improbable but the impossible” (PL 257). Disdaining “The Balloon-Hoax” as “ridiculous,” James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald used the occasion to refer to the current Sun publisher, Moses Y. Beach, as “that manufacturer of hoaxes of all kinds” (PL 460).Taking advantage of the loose editorial standards of the day, Poe sometimes pursued the opportunity to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments and even to fabricate details in his biography. For example, he reported that as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger he had increased the number of subscribers eightfold, from 700 to 5,500, in only fifteen months (Poe to Anthon, October 1844, eapoe.org), and later had boosted circulation at Graham’s tenfold (from 5,000 to 52,000) in only two years (ER 742). Poe’s estimates were repeated in some form in biographies and general reference works until Terrence Whalen, examining the surviving circulation records of the Southern Literary Messenger, found that subscriptions increased only modestly during Poe’s editorship, undermining his claims: “The oft-repeated Messenger story must therefore be seen as a deliberate act of deception” (Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999], 75).Perhaps in imitation of Byron, Poe added some details to his biography that made him seem more adventurous and more brilliant, and he also shaved two years off his official age. Poe gathered these claims for a biographical sketch intended for the Philadelphia Saturday Museum in 1843, hoping they would serve to promote his proposed magazine, The Stylus. The claims consisted entirely of “myths concerning the elopement of Poe’s parents, their death ‘on a visit to Richmond,’ Poe’s journey to Greece and St. Peterburg, [and] his return from Europe on the night after Mrs. Allan’s burial” (A. H. Quinn Edgar Allan Poe [1941; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 373). Although Poe expected his friend Frederick William Thomas to complete the article, Thomas, insisting he “knew more of his history,” demurred, and the sketch was completed by Henry W. Hirst, who claimed he had been helped by Thomas, which Poe dismissed as “a slight extension of the truth for which I pray you to forgive him” (Quinn 371). Thus, when Thomas confronted Poe regarding the inaccuracies and fictions in the sketch, he took the matter very lightly: “He was amused, and laughed the matter off by confessing that the story was intended to help the magazine project” (qtd. in Whalen 64).On another occasion, Poe insisted that the use of exaggeration was an essential element in the composition of “Berenice.” He famously enumerated the sources of the tale’s effectiveness: “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (PL 150). Poe continued by applying the process to editing: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.”Today, many species of exaggeration flourish in Silicon Valley, where careers are believed to thrive by following the maxim: “Fake it till you make it.” A recent severe example of the maxim was Elizabeth Holmes’s unicorn, her highly promising automated blood testing company Theranos. With her charming presence and appealing backstory, Holmes presented herself as a youthful, female version of the brilliantly successful Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. At its height Theranos raised an estimated $1 billion in investments, enjoyed a marketing agreement with Walgreen’s, and had an estimated stock value reaching as high as $10 billion. But Theranos proved to be something other than a legitimate invention seeking to turn a profit. On October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal began running a series of exposés revealing that the company’s signature device was a sham that had never worked; in order to perpetuate the lie, its supporting tests had been staged. In 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with a “years-long fraud” of deceiving both investors and patients. In January 2022 a jury found her guilty of four counts of fraud. Although Facebook has literally billions of users, very few of them stop to think about how the service works. Indeed, even outside Facebook very few understand its inner operations. There was great interest therefore when Frances Haugen, a former data engineer at Facebook, turned whistleblower in September 2021, sharing with the Securities Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal, the British Parliament, EU authorities, and even 60 Minutes thousands of internal company documents. Her evidence suggested that Facebook prioritized its profits over the public interest in its handling of a long list of sensitive subjects, including “political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, the promotion of ethnic violence, preferential treatment for certain users, and its communications with investors” (Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2021). Although Facebook employees spent 3.2 million hours tackling global issues of misinformation in 2020, Haugen’s documents disclosed that a disappointingly low 13 percent worked on content from outside the United States.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to Haugen, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense. I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted” (Facebook, October 6, 2021). Facebook spokesperson Mitch Henderson said it had spent $13 billion and hired forty thousand people to work on safety-related issues, further claiming its artificial intelligence software was catching 90 percent of hate speech. In rebuttal, Haugen said the figure was less than 5 percent (New York Times, October 25, 2021).After the Haugen papers appeared, Facebook changed its identity, preferring to be known as Meta. Zuckerberg expressed the hope on October 26, 2021, that over the coming five years people would move from seeing Facebook as “a social media company to being a metaverse company.” Since “metaverse” had become a widely adopted buzzword with a variety of meanings and associations, for many observers this immediately clarified little. But Facebook did have a concrete plan to invest at least $10 billion in its VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and AI (artificial intelligence) activities. Zuckerman remarked, “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet” (Facebook, October 28, 2021). Nevertheless, whether known as Facebook or Meta, the stock of the company collapsed, falling from its high in September 2011 by 45 percent in February 2022 (Bloomberg, February 18, 2022).After the era of Web1, the text-based early web, and Web2, the era of the interactive commercial web, Web3 promised to bring AR, VR, and AI into the home. However, some observers remain skeptical about the promises of machine or artificial intelligence: “For instance, many companies who claim to have developed algorithms that can recognize complicated images or derive meaning from text with machine learning don’t always mention that humans are often doing much of that work behind the scenes” (Washington Post, January 4, 2022; hereafter WP).Outside Silicon Valley in the United States today, in an era of ultra-partisan politics, unbridled exaggeration in the form of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, doctored media, conspiracy theories, and outright lies has become dangerously prevalent. Recently the word “hoax” is more likely to be applied to discussions of partisan politics than to literary antics in magazines and newspapers. In the United States nearly everyone seems to believe in some national political hoax. To Trump supporters, the hoax is the theft of the 2020 election by Biden and his supporters. To Trump critics, the hoax is Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen, despite the denials of Trump’s vice president and attorney general. In addition, there are also a parallel pair of irreconcilable views of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. While president, Trump was ceaselessly active on the social networks, especially Twitter. According to critical statistics gathered by the Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first three years as president, with the number increasing each year: “Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third claims a day in his January hoaxes have been to contemporary fake news, even they never to political G. “Fake Poe’s and the that in their of penny press as The Sun readers to their 2020, At the the penny press to some extent the of a that has been as the of and (qtd. in people a among media for that their the be among in Poe A in point is Poe’s story of the outside the Sun for the his of the balloon in the has because his to believe this great Poe had described a of for a so that the the Sun was literally for most of the The and Thomas a different starting from his that Poe’s after a or two of him “not but Poe his to a newspaper for he the but by a of on the the and told the that the extra was a hoax, as he for he had it The the and the . . . saw his author what he to be the of American repr., New York: a and who had Poe times in In “The Poe described her as “a a a a and a of of more I not to (ER one of her to Poe he had ever praised a in for Poe replied that to an act would be an he that he had so when to a way of “not his to In Poe he was guilty of a the of (qtd. in Quinn with Poe that he and even with of Edgar Allan Poe repr., New York: hereafter However, in a subsequent he to the that he all “I on would to the very the I would have in from and from and on this are and in “The of apparently for Poe, the of newspapers, us in in it is the of to create a make a to further the of (qtd. in this how to create a among readers by content with the of some “The mass of the people as only him who of the general (M in a of far beyond the of success in the maxim “Fake it till you make it.” For Poe, was never a of a successful but a to a variety of and pursued this by two which have been described as and in an Poe never in partisan fake people his of exaggeration and him to his work to literary as he in his that a (ER For Poe, even after or public much he continued his for and in “I . . . from a mental and of in are at
The West Point classmate who appreciated Poe as a “fellow of talent” assumed that he would be “too mad a poet to like Mathematics” (PL 114). Mad or not, Poe began his lifelong interest in mathematics by standing a respectable seventeenth in his math class of eighty-seven cadets. Throughout his career he maintained a continual thread of logical and mathematical awareness in his detective tales, science fiction, Eureka, and criticism, in counterpoint to their Gothic elements. To follow up on the unprecedented success of “The Raven,” Poe surprised his readers with the mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he had written “The Raven” by following a few logical precepts: “No one point in its composition is referrable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (L2 61–62).Poe experienced in antebellum American literary culture an unprecedented combination of historical factors: geographic expansion on a continental scale, major moral reform, and sweeping technological innovations. These complexities give his career special relevance for us today as we face the dangerous mix of political uncertainties, COVID, Ukraine, and the dual economic worries of inflation and depression. Our response today is to turn toward the digital or virtual equivalents of in-person work and socialization. Thus traditional culture is being replaced to some extent by mechanized procedures and oceans of data. The new mathematical entities have been enlivened to some extent by assuming two-letter abbreviations: AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and VR (virtual reality). Facebook, once a familiar and stable cultural standard, is now refashioning itself as Meta, transforming ordinary reality into AR (augmented reality).These fundamental transitions deeply affect the Internet, as might well be imagined. When websites first appeared in the 1990s, they were composed chiefly of static pages of information. In response to the innovations of interactive social networks, blogs, wikis, and shared media, Tim O’Reilly in 2004 introduced the term “Web 2.0.” In the early web, which became known retrospectively as Web 1.0, a typical attraction was the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, its static pages written by experts. In Web 2.0 the comparable page was Wikipedia, an ongoing compendium produced by multiple anonymous contributors. After smartphones encouraged the broad expansion of the Internet, Web 2.0, being largely unregulated, contained material that had legal protection, but which unprotected printed outlets could not risk publishing. One serious charge was that Web 2.0 had spread conspiracy theories, hate, and racist sentiments, and even lies and disinformation. At the same time, the Internet was accused of ignoring privacy, being flagrantly partisan in political elections, and offering unstable advice on the COVID pandemic. In addition, many web pages practiced what Shoshana Zuboff studied in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) as the relentless collection and sale of demographic data, location information, and personal habits online. The final effect is that the Internet, once trustworthy, is no longer so.In the worst case, a would-be shooter could take advantage of the low level of supervision in order to obtain on the Internet uncensured instructions on how to make bombs and ghost guns. Some shooters realized that their attacks could be live streamed, thereby encouraging other shooters. Thus in 2019 the New Zealand shooter who killed fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch live streamed the event, providing an example for the Buffalo shooter who used the Internet in multiple ways in his racist attack on a Tops supermarket in spring 2022. He drew information from BitChute, a video sharing site, Reddit, 4chan chat rooms, racist articles on HuffPost and Medium, and practical videos on YouTube. During his fatal shootings, he streamed video live on Twitch, afterward writing a diary, producing a 180-page manifesto, and posting details on Discord. The common thread in these mass shootings is the belief in replacement theory, the notion that Blacks, immigrants, and others were eliminating the dominant white culture in order to replace it with a radical alternative culture. The nonprofit site Media Matters for America reportedly found fifty ads on Facebook promoting replacement theory, some from candidates for political office, in addition to restored posts previously removed from mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit (New York Times, June 1, 2022).Today, as the Internet turns from Web 2.0 to what is called Web3, many observers hope that its new technologies will provide protection that the legal system has failed to offer thus far. Thus Web3 holds up some hope, although most users may still not know what it is. The term could not be explained by 70 percent of the readers of the Harvard Business Review in a survey conducted online on LinkedIn in March 2022. The promise of Web3, to use its own terminology, would be to store data on the blockchain of individual users and rely on its own cryptocurrency to replace transactions of untrustworthy governments and large organizations. The general promise of blockchain is that it would take power now concentrated in the hands of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft and redistribute it across the Internet to empower ordinary users.Many claims are now being made for this new technology. Web3 is decentralized because ownership is distributed among its builders and users. Web3 is permissionless because everyone has equal access. Web3 uses native payments of cryptocurrency instead of banks and payment processors. Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms. Two more features: Web3 uses DeFi, decentralized finance, and DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations.Supporters argue that Web3 will provide increased data security, scalability, and privacy for users, combating the influence of large technology companies. However, critics are concerned that a decentralized web with low regulation can disseminate harmful content and end up concentrating new wealth in a small group of early investors, turning crypto into a Ponzi scheme.Thomas Stackpole’s balanced response in response to the question “What Is Web3?” appeared in the Harvard Business Review of May 10, 2022. Much interest in Web3 stems from envy or FOMO (fear of missing out) because some early investors had reported making a fortune by investing in crypto. Memorably, famous media stars, not just techno-libertarians and bank haters, were appearing as advocates on TV and in commercials. What started as a curiosity and speculative niche became big business.Crypto is supported by blockchain, which is a “distributed ledger” whose database is backed by a network of independent computers. The idea of the “digital deed” is to support the ownership records of unique digital objects, which are called nonfungible tokens or NFTs. In 2022, their market was said to be worth $41 billion, a value that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Needless to say, blockchain faces major technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles as well as the hazards of intentional abuse. Nevertheless, some experiments in Web3 are now underway in the communities of the NBA, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Time magazine. However, the assets of Web3 are highly concentrated: “The top 0.01% of bitcoin holders own 27% of the supply” (bitcoinist.com).To some critics, Web3 seems to be largely speculation in cryptocurrencies, a mirroring of the shadow banking practices that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis. At one time the value of crypto is said to have risen as high as $3 trillion, but in the summer of 2022 it reportedly fell to $1 trillion (decrypt.co). The skeptic Jim Chanos, an American investment manager, called crypto a “predatory junkyard”; columnist Paul Krugman labeled crypto a “postmodern pyramid scheme” (New York Times, July 12, 2022). In China and eight other countries, cryptocurrencies have already been banned, and its treatment under European regulations remains unclear. Despite catastrophic losses, the enthusiasm of some advocates of crypto remains undampened (New York Times, August 2, 2022).Many of the hopes and fears concerning Web3 depend on its use of big data and mathematical procedures, which add convenience but also weaken human control. The huge swings of opinion on the subject may reflect the public’s low level of mathematical literacy. In Poe’s case, some contemporaries were distressed by what they saw as his excessively mathematical side. Charles Frederick Briggs, founder of the Broadway Journal, who hired Poe as an editor, complained about Poe to James Russell Lowell on June 27,1845: “I think a machine, something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (www.eapoe.org). Poe had been early aware of Babbage’s computer, mentioning it in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836) and again in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1845), which Briggs excerpted in the Broadway Journal on January 25, 1845 (PL 497), just a few days before the publication of “The Raven.”In the poem Poe used the raven, a highly intelligent animal with deep associations in myth, prophecy, and tradition, for its special voice reputedly resembling that of human speech. Poe’s tale of a bereaved lover is cast as a ballad in which he asks a series of questions to which the raven speaks the refrain “Nevermore” in reply. The lover’s midnight reading is interrupted by an outbreak of involuntary memory (to use Proust’s term) of his sorrowful thoughts of the loss of his “sainted Lenore,” now in heaven, hoping for a joyous future reunion with her in the afterlife. However, the raven’s refrain “Nevermore” startles him, denying this meeting will ever take place, then resisting the lover’s attempt to dismiss him. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe quotes the final text that presents the image of the shadow of the raven on the floor, and the startling disclosure that the shadow now contains the young man’s soul:Then, perhaps for the benefit of genteel readers of Graham’s, where the essay appeared, Poe describes the final effect of the poem as “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (L2 70), a deep sentiment that Kenneth Silverman uses as the subtitle of his biography of Poe. However, some readers have had a different understanding, seeing allegorical significance in the young man’s soul leaving his body and becoming entrapped in the raven’s shadow on the floor, never to leave. Here “Nevermore” is not the raven’s refrain but the young man’s own description, concluding the ballad with the allegorical suggestion that the young man’s trapped soul signified his realization of his imminent fate of madness, death, and damnation. In this reading, the closing text of the poem does not support Poe’s account of the young man’s final sentimental and melancholy separation from Lenore; instead, the ballad concludes abruptly with the shock, amplified by its severe understatement, of the young man’s first realization of the full extent of his final moral state and its associated terror and horror.Although Poe may not have been, as his West Point classmate claimed, “too mad a poet to like Mathematics,” he evidently realized at some point that a reputation for mathematical proficiency would do wonders for his reputation. Thus he also adds a second mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition,” namely that “the extent of a poem” exists in a “mathematical relation to its merit . . . [adding that] the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect” (L2 62). Indeed, a short poem such as a sonnet may be more intense than a long epic, but Poe’s claim of a precise “direct ratio” in the number of lines overstates the case. Nevertheless, Poe understood that exaggeration in matters of appearance could make an impression more memorable. In private, Poe admitted that what he called his tales of ratiocination could owe more to their novelty than to their logical discipline. “These tales of ratiocination,” Poe wrote to Phillip P. Cooke, “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (PL 661).“Poe in Cyberspace” columns are available online at eapoe.info.
Claus Huitfeldt, Yves Marcoux, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
The type/token distinction introduced by C. S. Peirce and taken up by many others is familiar when applied to individual symbols or characters in a writing system, and also when applied at a higher level to words (and word-like objects). Some writers apply the distinction not only at some basic or foundational level but also as a description of higher levels of organization. This paper follows their example by outlining a concrete extension of the type/token distinction to all levels of document organization, specifying that higher-level types may contain sequences of lower-level types, and similarly for higher- and lower-level tokens. We further extend the usual model of types and tokens by allowing higher-level types to contain not just sequences of (lower-level) types but also sets, bags, conjunctions and disjunctions of types. This allows the system to deal gracefully both with indeterminate documents (e.g., a manuscript in which it is not clear whether a given mark on the page represents a 'c' or a 't') and with intentionally polyvalent documents, in which some marks are to be read as tokens of more than one type, as in the “ambigram”, a sort of combination puzzle and calligraphic artwork in which the shapes on the page may be read in different ways, or the same way, in different directions. This account of document structure in terms of types and tokens is similar in many ways to that offered by SGML, XML, and other systems of descriptive markup. On this view, SGML and XML elements are, strictly speaking, types (and tokens) in Peirce's sense of those words. Some techniques developed in other areas to which the type/token distinction is relevant may be useful in work on markup languages (and vice versa).
Digital Humanities and Scholarship
Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing