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2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh 82aa0b6d76 lv-krakauer: PARKED — research is not a voice (operator, henge id 82)
Operator ruling: "he's a great writer because of his research, not because he has a strong
identifiable voice."

That reason is about the AUTHOR rather than the data, and it is the better of the two on the
table -- the other being the unmeasurable fraction of quoted material. It also names a
selection criterion this line did not have: ask whether there IS a voice worth adapting
before investigating whether a clean corpus can be built. That question was never asked here.
I surveyed the holdings, built the corpus, measured all fifteen containment pairs, and fixed
three stripping defects the name guard caught -- all real work, none of it touching the thing
that decided it.

A voice adapter is worth its corpus-plus-training-plus-gate only when the target has a prose
signature a reader could pick out blind. McCarthy: 0.0 quote marks per 10k against Hemingway's
838. Hemingway: spare declaratives, heavy unattributed dialogue. Brontë: periodic sentences
built on semicolons and dashes. If that sentence is hard to write, the author is a park.

Nothing is deleted. The corpus (126 units, 422,880 words) and the builder stay committed and
re-runnable; the park entry records what exists, what was never started (D2), and what would
unpark it -- a re-extraction preserving indentation and italics, which would fix the quoted-
material problem but not the operator's objection. The builder's own docstring now carries a
stop notice so a future session finds the reason at the artifact rather than only in memory.
2026-09-17 08:34:47 -07:00
vh 4be063071a lv-krakauer D1: 126 units, 422,880 words — and an unmeasured fraction is not his prose
The first non-fiction corpus in this line. Builds clean and should not be trained on until
an operator scope call is made; the reason is in the module docstring and the manifest.

  into-the-wild               25u   67,606w  caps-title    [smallcaps 21][back -1,015][epi -52]
  missoula                    32u  115,841w  chapter-word  [smallcaps  8][front -858][back -2,874]
  under-the-banner-of-heaven  33u  118,171w  caps-title
  where-men-win-glory         36u  121,262w  chapter-word  [smallcaps  3][front -1,548][back -6,093]

⚠⚠ THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM IS QUOTATION, AND IT IS NOT MEASURED BECAUSE IT CANNOT BE.
Krakauer quotes constantly and at length -- McCandless's journals and letters, Tillman's
diaries, court transcripts, depositions, Mormon historical documents, and whole paragraphs
of Jack London and Wallace Stegner at the chapter heads. In print those are indented or
italic; the extraction lost both, so inside the master they are ordinary paragraphs and no
signal this builder can read separates them from his own sentences.

Only 52 words were removable -- chapter-head epigraphs whose all-caps attribution line
survived. That is 0.01% and it is NOT the answer: the method would report 0.0% for a book
made entirely of undated block quotes. The stated floor rather than the number is what a
reader needs. This is the same error as excluding The Torrents of Spring from Hemingway --
another author's style under the target's name -- distributed rather than concentrated, and
the fraction is unknown. Scope is the operator's call, exactly as fiction-only was.

THREE DEFECTS THE NAME GUARD CAUGHT, none of which the build would have reported otherwise:

  1. Back matter searched only the LAST unit. Where Men Win Glory's ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sits at
     94.8% and the splitter made 41 units, so the apparatus landed in unit 37 with NOTES and
     BIBLIOGRAPHY after it -- all past a strip that only looked at unit 41. Into the Wild
     kept its acknowledgments AND a full-page advertisement for another of his books. Now
     windowed to the last 25% and cut before the split.
  2. Relying on the splitter to drop front matter did not work. Units begin at the first
     heading mark, and in two works the ebook's table of contents sits above the author's
     note -- giving the splitter a `Chapter Thirty-Two` to start on, so unit 1 swallowed the
     apparatus and its signed `Jon Krakauer , February 2015`. Now cut at that signature,
     windowed to the first 10%.
  3. Zero was the wrong bar. 21 survivors became 2, and both were read: `Lewis Krakauer
     loved his five children deeply` is Krakauer writing about his own father in the two
     autobiographical chapters of Into the Wild, and the other is a reader's letter he
     quotes calling him a kook. Hemingway's own name in his corpus was always publisher
     apparatus, so 0 was right there; this author writes about himself. The allowance is
     pinned at 2 and every survivor is printed with context, so a master change or a strip
     that stops working fails loudly instead of widening in silence.

Both strips are windowed in OPPOSITE directions from McCarthy's, which is the point worth
carrying: McCarthy's apparatus is at the end and the earliest marker wins; Krakauer's is at
both ends and the same marker words appear in his front matter at 0.0-0.6% of the file.
2026-09-17 08:24:59 -07:00