“Leaves of Ivory”: Erasable Writing in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the neglected practice of writing on ivory in the eighteenth century. It places the ivory tablet, or memorandum-book, within the history of erasable writing, demonstrating the purposes for which it was used, and the affective meanings it could carry. Like other forms of writing technology it reveals much about contemporary conceptions of memory and the mind. The properties of ivory are considered along with its role in global trade. Detailed attention to two late eighteenth-century novels, Miss/Mrs Pilkington’s Delia, a Pathetic and Interesting Tale (1790) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) shows how the representation of the ivory tablet in fiction raises crucial questions regarding the interplay between remembering and forgetting, as well as the perils of female authorship. Though its contents are designed to be erased, the ivory tablet makes a lasting contribution to the period’s literary and philosophical debates.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".