An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker

Seems like you don't need an LLM, you just need a human who (1) likes reading Stoker and (2) touch-types. :) I'd volunteer, if I didn't think I'd be duplicating effort at this point.

(I've transcribed various things over the years, including Sonia Greene's Alcestis [1] and Holtzman & Kershenblatt's "Castlequest" source code [2], so I know it doesn't take much except quick fingers and sufficient motivation. :))

[1] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/10/22/alcestis/

[2] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/03/09/castlequest/

EDIT: ...and as I was writing that, you seem to have finished your transcription. :)

Too late. You have already been scooped by, of course, tumblr:

<https://woodsfae.tumblr.com/post/764918993659330560/gibbet-h...>

I tried extracting the content using Google Gemini 1.5 Pro 002 using https://aistudio.google.com/ - the first page (scan-2) worked fantastically well, the second page not so much. Here's what I got so far: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba87f507ef5c11d3335959c055533...

Only typo I found was the word "ggshells" which I assume should be "eggshells"; great work!

probably you would want to get the project gutenberg people onto it

It seems that often even Dracula is viewed as a "good bad book". Not high quality literature, but great to read.

I realise I've used vague terms in that sentence, even setting aside the tricky question of what makes the things often described as great works "greater" than things that are looked down on, but might be much more popular.

I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example. It was by a famous author (as I remember), but I can't remember, and can't find, the foreword or the novel I'm thinking of.

Not a novel, but the short story "Dracula's Guest" I thought was quite good. I was sad it was so short.

> Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.

It’s interesting that Dracula falls right in the middle of his career. It strongly suggests it was a fluke. Doesn’t look like he ever had an inkling of how famous the story would be, the Wikipedia page says he was best known while living for being a personal assistant and business manager to some other bloke. That’s a bit sad.

I suspect you're getting downvoted by people who haven't actually read anything by Stoker.

My wife has read most of his stuff. I know because I buy it for her. She says aside from Dracula, most of it is not great.

Not much to add, other than the fact I’m reading your comment at Bran Castle :)

It's fantastic to look at an old newspaper from those times. Such an abundance and density of reading material.

Well, he lived in Dublin, where Stoker lived, and I'd bet the library he visited had a special Stoker collection that might have attracted a fan. There's also the fact that Stoker's mother Charlotte helped open state schools for deaf children; so there may have been some connection there, too. But yeah, on such strange coincidences many discoveries rest.

It's interesting how much you can find just by reading old newspapers and magazines. Everybody just reads Wikipedia now, even journalists, so it's become basically the sole source of truth. If it's not in there, it's not on record. But if you scratch the surface just a little bit, you find tidbits that are only mentioned on places like ancient newsgroup threads, or sometimes not mentioned at all on the public web. Libraries, man!

The funds from publishing also going to an org focused on those who suffer hearing loss—-which is for Stoker’s mother who was a hearing loss campaigner.

I also wondered if he was tipped off.

Sure, people can do scams but it will be way more interesting to apply them to finding stuff like this. Up through now, literary treasures and open secrets are sitting out waiting to be recognized.

And why bother with trying to deceive when one could build reputation for creating truly good fan fiction based off real source material.

Just because tech can be used to abuse trust doesn't mean it will be the most interesting and commonly recognized thing to do with it.

I imagine it will be a lot like other pieces of art where the provenance is really critical. If it cannot be traced properly back to the originator, then it will always be viewed as dubious. With that said, as a person largely ignorant of the field, I'd wager this is probably true now, irrespective the rise of LLMs.

LLMs tend not to volunteer information without the right prompting. The more you yourself know, the better use you can get out of an LLM, because you can steer it in profitable directions. This article could just as easily have been found by a text search on OCR'd microfilm, and it's hard to imagine a prompt that would be effective in bringing the article to light without already knowing it exists.

I can see it now:

"3 million lost works of Shakespeare found"

I’ve found that it’s not uncommon for an interested individual to find details that have not been documented or “found” by others. I collect video games and have found variants of popular games that have been otherwise undocumented on any list or archive that I was aware of. I’ve found audio recordings from the 90s that seemingly have no recorded history on the internet.

These aren’t things historians have had hundreds of years to document, but several thousand or more people have been on this space long before I was looking at it more intently than I could ever and I still come across things from time to time that weren’t known to exist.

Likewise, in the past month I’ve spent an unfortunate amount of time reading laws and board bylaws and it doesn’t take long to find long forgotten rules that are being actively violated. Even outside of code, documentation is hard.

"missed" might be taken to imply that one or more of them had ever bothered to look.

If this was an unpublished manuscript, rights of first publication would apply and it might be covered by a kind of copyright that would vary depending on the country. Since this was "rediscovered" after first being unambiguously published back in the 1890s, it's pretty clearly in the public domain.

OP got incredibly lucky though that the author's name was included in the original publication - things like this (i.e. contributions to newspapers or magazines) were often published under obscure pseudonyms, initials, puzzling hints like "By the author of Such-and-such" or no author indication at all.

I _think_ UK copyright law would matter here, since at the time the story was published (1890) the Ireland was part of the UK (Ireland gained independence in 1921.)

If UK copyright applied, then the story would have entered public domain in 1932. The term of copyright for published works at the time as 7 years after the authors death, or 42 years, whichever was longer.

Yes, it's public domain

Funnily enough there was a reddit post from around the time the manuscript was discovered (but before it was announced) asking a similar question

Hard disks are great storage mediums when we don't purposely set fire to them to preserve the profits of large corporations. The Internet Archive is perfectly capable of preserving things, unless copyright holders manage to shut them down for short-term profit.

Agreed, and I think it's important to note that paper doesn't have any sort of DRM encumbrance on it. I seriously think that at some point in the next few decades, the "pirates" who right now are hated and prosecuted vigorously by all the "rightsholders" may turn out to be venerable heroes for having preserved the creations.

Imagine if we had found Bram Stokers work, and it was also encrypted mumbo jumbo that is now useless to us. We'll likely never know what we lost.