“A Piece of History the Most Remarkable & Interesting That Ever Happened in Any Age or Country”: “The Lyon in Mourning” Manuscript of Robert Forbes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter presents a book-history analysis of a 2,148-page manuscript book known as “The Lyon in Mourning.” Compiled after the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden (1746), the work consists of pro-Jacobite materials copied out by Episcopalian minister Robert Forbes into ten blank octavo books. The items collected include scaffold speeches by executed Jacobite prisoners, eyewitness narratives of those who helped the Stuart cause, letters, songs, poems, and even a list of goods the Jacobites purchased in the last few months of the conflict. Although “The Lyon in Mourning” remained unpublished in Forbes's lifetime, the Scottish Historical Society published a three-volume printed version in 1895–96. The printed version succeeded in generating knowledge about the work, but it also fundamentally changed how the manuscript was perceived. In an effort to shine new light on Forbes's project and to generate new research on Jacobitism in general, Simon Fraser University's Research Centre for Scottish Studies and the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab are partnering with the National Library of Scotland to create a Digital Humanities project focused on “The Lyon in Mourning.” Here, I outline some of the research directions that we will pursue as we gain insight into Forbes's use of the manuscript medium in the context of the eighteenth-century mediascape. The first section considers the historical context and generic content of Forbes's collection. The second section examines the multimedia nature of the items that Forbes collected, noting his own focus on the materiality of the texts he copied out. The third section considers Forbes's use of the manuscript genre for the storage, curation, and retrieval of information. I conclude by examining how Forbes's project to preserve the experiences of his fellow Jacobites was intertwined in this handwritten document with his fashioning of his own life as a reader/writer and witness for Jacobite networks.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".