The Heresy of Vector Embeddings: Early Modern Manuscript Verse and LLMs between Meaning, Form, and History

The European Research Council-funded project "STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475 to 1700" computationally models the manuscript circulation of early modern poetry to gain macro-level insights into the overlapping contexts in which it was written, read, and copied.To facilitate STEMMA's ultimate goal of modeling the circulation of manuscript poetry as a large-scale network, the project began by combining and reconciling five of the most authoritative sources of relevant data using staged LLM-assisted pipelines.These pipelines were effective on a large proportion of the data, but they struggled in relation to particular features of early modern poetics, including imitation, translation, and unique works.This paper considers how general models' shortcomings in relation to early modern poetry can be considered a feature rather than a bug, pointing up new insights into poetics by defamiliarizing them.It considers productive intersections between literary theory and criticism and recent scholarship on LLMs and suggests that two seemingly very different fields of study address what are, at core, rather similar fundamental questions. Plain Language SummaryThis paper discusses LLM-assisted methods for cleaning a large dataset about handwritten copies of English-language poetry created between 1475 and 1700.It shows that these methods were not only helpful for their intended purpose of cleaning the data but also provided new insights into the poems themselves, particularly when the LLMs struggled.Specifically, the LLM-assisted methods struggled where early modern poetics were at odds with the modern prose on which general models are trained.Fundamental early modern practices such as imitation and translation and unique poems posed particular challenges for the computational methods used.The essay concludes with a reflection on concerns shared by early modern studies and literary theory as well as linguistics and natural language processing.The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings. . ..The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula.