Nummendal, Tara, and Donna Bilak, eds. Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Furnace and Fugue presents a comprehensive digital edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618).This emblem book was an experiment in genre, combining as it does not only the expected emblematic word and image constructs, but also providing both musical notations for the three-voice fugues for each of the 50 emblems that comprise it and the learned paratexts that expound on alchemical materials, sources, and practices.The German physician Maier, also a Rosicrucian, put on a dazzling display of alchemical erudition in poetry, commentaries, and song; his work was intended to engage the senses in emblematic synesthesia.The facsimiles, transcriptions, translations, and recordings provided in this scholarly resource exploit the affordances of digital editorial technology that allow users to explore the work's texts, images, and musical settings.The original German and Latin texts are complemented by a seventeenth-century manuscript translation in English, Atlanta Running, now held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the texts and musical notations have been modernized according to scholarly conventions to provide access to a wider public.1 Unlike the other projects reviewed in this issue of Early Modern Digital Review that primarily comprise databases and digital facsimiles to make accessible rare books that normally are difficult to study, Furnace and Fugue offers a comprehensive edition of a single remarkable book.Thus, the change in the focus of the website reviewed here shifts from the high-quality presentation of many emblem books and their individual emblems to the representation and scholarly apparatus of a single volume and its rich contexts.Furnace and Fugue offers some exemplary digital presentations.Among the main divisions of the site (see Fig. 1) is a "Get Acquainted" section, framed 1. See collections.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.007 |
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".