AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The colophon converges like a legal form
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Early colophons are chatty and idiosyncratic; a professionalizing copying market should standardize them, the way notarial formulas and coin legends standardize — templates cut transaction costs and signal competence to patrons. Standardization is measurable as falling lexical diversity of colophon wording over time within a single copying population. If the trend is present, it dates the emergence of copying-as-industry independently of any narrative source, and its reversals would flag institutional disruptions in the book trade. If it holds, a colophon's degree of formularity becomes both a rough date and a professionalism index for the enormous population of otherwise undatable manuscripts.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Binning NGMPP/NGMCP colophon transcriptions by century of copy date, the type-token ratio of colophon phrase-openings will decline monotonically from the earliest well-populated century band to 1800, and the share of colophons matching the ten most common templates will at least double over the same span. Primary clause: the monotone type-token decline; the template-share doubling is secondary.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Computational analysis of colophon wording across dated records in the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue.
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Colophon standardization and professionalization over c.1400-1800 is an active research theme (Bahl & Hanß; Ciotti), but the computational claim — monotone type-token-ratio decline of colophon phrase-openings plus doubling template share — is un-run.
Predictions
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