The scroll tax on the tail

Status: No prior located

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The scroll tax on the tail. Leishu quotation habits should encode the physical access cost of the scroll. A compiler excerpting a source before the late Tang paid a sequential-access price — matter at the head of a juan costs one motion of the roller, matter at the tail costs the whole unrolling — while codex-style bindings and print made access random. So the positional bias of encyclopedia quotation (how strongly excerpts cluster toward the front of the source juan) is not a fixed habit of Chinese compilation but a function of book format, and it should visibly relax between a scroll-age leishu and a codex-age one.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For source works that survive independently, locate each quotation's position within its source juan by decile of graph count. Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Yiwen leiju (624), the share of quotations drawn from the first three deciles of the source juan exceeds the corresponding share in the Taiping yulan or Cefu yuangui (10th-11th c.) by at least 10 percentage points. Secondary: within each leishu, head-bias strengthens with source-juan length, as an access-cost account requires.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Yiwen leiju and Taiping yulan full texts on the Kanseki Repository (Kanripo), collated against extant source texts (Shiji, Hanshu, Wenxuan) also on Kanripo. Resolvable against Kanripo without new ingestion.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

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Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 248-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-11)

The scroll-versus-codex sequential/random access contrast is a book-history commonplace, and leishu quotation reuse (Taiping yulan drawing on Yiwen leiju) is documented, but no located work — even qualitatively — proposes measuring within-juan positional bias of encyclopedia quotations as a function of book format. The connection appears genuinely un-proposed despite substantial leishu scholarship on both sides of it.

Predictions

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