Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sirs, In his ‘Unpaid Debts to London Booksellers: John Harrison the Elder’s Lawsuit against Two Chapmen in 1585’ (The Library, VII, 24 (2023), 332–42), Jonathan McGovern has provided a useful appendix: an annotated list of the books involved and their values. Although only eight of the 114 books at issue are known to have been printed for John the Elder (and only one for John the Younger) there can be no serious doubt about which John Harrison was the plaintiff. It is therefore unfortunate that McGovern’s attempt to distinguish among the Harrisons (and to identify his in-laws and his partners in the Flower syndicate) is somewhat muddled. In volume 3 of the revised STC (1991) the four best-known of the Stationers’ Elizabethan John Harrisons are helpfully numbered 1–4 on pages 77–78.1 John 1 is there described as ‘Possibly the son of Richard Harrison; son-in-law of Reyner Wolfe. Half-brother of John Harrison 2; father of John 3 and Joseph Harrison’. ‘Half-brother’, however, is an unsupported Victorian guess. In his will John 1 describes his former apprentice John 2 as ‘my brother’ more than once.2 The idea that a father would choose to give two of his sons the same name evidently troubled E. Gordon Duff,3 to whom the only plausible excuse seemed to be that the two Johns perhaps had different mothers—as if that would somehow make it clearer which John was being either summoned or referred to. But in an age when it was not uncommon for a son to be given the same Christian name as his godfather, the desire to compliment two godfathers who happened to share a conspicuously common forename (or to gratify an especially respected candidate twice) might easily outweigh the potential for domestic confusion.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.934 | 0.858 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".