SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry. Pp. xxiii + 264. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 18.99 (ISBN 0 1987 1201 4)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999), Seamus Perry made his case for ‘muddles’: ‘A good muddle … has an informal but determining structure, an internal arrangement of conflicting callings or visions of reality, and rises above the indignity of a sheerly incoherent conceptual mess’ (11). In Coleridge's notebooks Perry has found the greatest good muddle of all, ‘perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age’ (vii), as he writes in the Introduction to this selection, which admirably meets the appealingly contradictory challenge of presenting a muddle of such magnitude in a neat volume while maintaining the dignity of Coleridge's characteristically coherent messiness. Perry offers the entries in chronological order and arranges them into five chapters and a coda: ‘The West Country 1794–1798’, ‘Germany, London, the Lakes 1798–1804’, ‘London, Malta, Italy 1804–1806’, ‘The Lakes, London 1806–1810’, ‘London, Wiltshire 1810–1816’, and ‘Highgate 1816–1820’. Each chapter is ‘terminated by important epochs in the story’ (xiv), and in this description Perry calls attention to the chief virtue of the edition: the entries do tell a story, or rather, stories, both biographical and intellectual. Among the features of Coleridge's life and thought that Perry's selections narrate are his relationships with the Wordsworths and Sara Hutchinson; his travels; his lifelong conflict between longings for unity – ‘extremes meet’ (50) – and the incredibly multiform tendencies of his own mind; his dreams, and especially his ‘night-horrors’ (76); his close observations of the material world – ‘What a beautiful Thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous’ (52); his debilitating self-doubts and fears; and his reflections upon the notebooks themselves. Readers should note that Perry's selections end in 1820 and that he has ‘chosen not to feature in great number those entries that deal with the more abstruse reaches of Coleridge's theologico-philosophical speculations’, although he has ‘kept in some of the kind’ (xiii).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.201 | 0.157 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".