Plerome
Engines for knowledge of the pre-print world, the centuries before the printing press: what survives of it and what was lost from it.
Plerome is a project of Stephen Pink, a historian of the centuries either side of the coming of print and principal organiser of Ars Inquirendi, an international conference on language models and the pre-print past.
Now published
QUINCUNX
A discovery engine for the world’s sparsest domains — corners of the historical record where evidence survives thinnest. The co-authored paper describing it, together with its full audit record, is now published.
Read the paper →
One Thousand and One Conjectures
a problem book for the pre-print world
Claims about the world before print, most of them generated by language models. Each is falsifiable: stated so that evidence could prove it wrong, and published with a proposed test. A public scorecard records which have been killed and which supported, and visitors can respond or add their own.
Enter the conjectures →
Inferpedia
an encyclopedia of the missing
Things that almost certainly existed, but that no surviving document directly records: lost books, unnamed people, vanished buildings, events known only from their echoes. Every article is an audited argument, never a settled fact.
Enter the encyclopedia →
Paper Machines
instruments made to be turned
Working reconstructions of the instruments that medieval and early modern readers turned by hand, from Ramon Llull’s wheels to Nicholas of Lynn’s lunar volvelle, a calculator made of rotating paper discs.
Turn the wheels →
Essays
what language models know, and how we could tell
- What I think I don’t know A language model’s map of the gaps in its own knowledge, checked against measured results.
- How to photograph a noetome A protocol that other laboratories could repeat for measuring what one model knows, its “noetome”.
- Notes from the Third Chamber An essay written under a machine’s name on how language models differ from us, read through the psychologist Julian Jaynes.
Encyclopaedia Atlantica
a shelf that never diverged from itself
An encyclopaedia from a world where the English Commonwealth never fell — a work of alternate-historical fiction, scanned entry by entry, with its own invented history, contributors, and biases held to a canon as disciplined as any evidence-led project here. It is evidence about nothing; read it as an argument played all the way out.
Enter the Atlantica →
The projects keep score in public: track record · corrections · how to read all this