← All conjectures · The oral-written interface
Expansion joints show in the masonry
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Singers of oral epic stretched or shrank a song to fit the night, and the natural places to cut or add are the seams between type-scenes — arming, feasting, sacrifice, journey. The surprising connection is that the papyrus and codex witnesses of Homer, which disagree by whole extra or missing lines, should preserve that elasticity as a map: plus-verses and minus-verses clustering at type-scene boundaries rather than falling uniformly through the poem. Rhapsodes and early copyists made it so because a seam is where an insertion does not tear the fabric — the performing memory and the interpolating pen respect the same joints. If this holds, the location of Homeric interpolation becomes predictable in advance, and a portion of 'textual corruption' re-describes as inherited performance flexibility.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Mark type-scene boundaries throughout both epics, then map every plus- and minus-verse locus in the collated witnesses. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the share of plus/minus-verse loci falling within five lines of a type-scene boundary is at least twice the share expected from the boundaries' coverage of the poem.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The Homer Multitext project: its collations of plus- and minus-verses across the manuscript and papyrus witnesses of the Iliad and Odyssey.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge with zero tool use and emitted as a single text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That singers expand at type-scenes (Edwards) and that plus-verses fit organically as performance variation (Bird) are both established, but the spatial statistic — plus/minus-verse loci clustering within five lines of type-scene boundaries at twice chance rates — has never been computed on the Multitext collations.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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