John Willis, The Art of Memory (1621, 1661)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
About the author John Willis (d. 1625) developed a widely used system of shorthand writing and wrote extensively on applications of the memory arts. About the text The Art of Memory (1621) is a translation of the third part of Willis's Latin treatise, Mnemonica, sive reminiscendi ars (1618); a complete and augmented translation of the whole was produced by Leonard Sowersby (1661). The arts of memory This work is the most thoroughly developed English treatise on the memory arts that is not directly indebted to continental sources. Colloquial examples and contemporary references abound, such as tying a ribbon around one's finger as a visual reminder of something still to be done (A6 r ). Willis insists that memory theatres be constructed realistically in every detail to facilitate the effective staging and recall of ideas. Explicit references are made to emblems and imprese as viable components of memory theatres; and to this end Willis advocates keeping a commonplace book ( enchiridion ) for sorting and storing all such items under distinct headings. Textual notes John Willis, Mnemonica, or, The art of memory (London, 1661), A3 r –A6 v , B6 r –B6 v , E2 v –F2 v ; the final excerpt follows The art of memory (London, 1621), C5 r-v , for Willis's elaboration on this passage is not retained in later versions. The Art of Memory The Preface First I acknowledge and willingly confess, that writing is the surest guardian of memorable things, far excelling all other art of memory; but a man cannot always commit to writing everything he desireth to remember, and must therefore necessarily sometimes make use of other helps as writing memorandums is worthily esteemed the best way of remembering; so that may rightly challenge the next place, which heareth greatest affinity thereto. Now if men deal impartially, they will easily find that the art of memory by places and ideas or images doth very nearly resemble writing. The places in artificial memory are, as it were, leaves; the ideas, letters; the distribution of them in places representeth writing; lastly, the repetition of them, reading, which thing Cicero in his Partitions , but more copiously in his second book De Oratore , doth elegantly declare.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.006 |
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".