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GADSBY |
I |
If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for |
it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, |
do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today |
who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts |
functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, |
thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility |
for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport. |
Up to about its primary school days a child thinks, naturally, only of |
play. But many a form of play contains disciplinary factors. "You can't |
do this," or "that puts you out," shows a child that it must think, |
practically, or fail. Now, if, throughout childhood, a brain has no |
opposition, it is plain that it will attain a position of "status quo," |
as with our ordinary animals. Man knows not why a cow, dog or lion was |
not born with a brain on a par with ours; why such animals cannot add, |
subtract, or obtain from books and schooling, that paramount position |
which Man holds today. |
But a human brain is not in that class. Constantly throbbing and |
pulsating, it rapidly forms opinions; attaining an ability of its own; |
a fact which is startlingly shown by an occasional child "prodigy" |
in music or school work. And as, with our dumb animals, a child's |
inability convincingly to impart its thoughts to us, should not class |
it as ignorant. |
Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young |
folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man |
of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him |
as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is |
not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such |
customary "fill-ins" as "romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down |
a long, winding country road." Nor will it say anything about tinklings |
lulling distant folds; robins carolling at twilight, nor any "warm glow |
of lamplight" from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing |
activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical |
discarding of that worn-out notion that "a child don't know anything." |
Now, any author, from history's dawn, always had that most important |
aid to writing:--an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in |
building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction |
did not block his path. But in _my_ story that mighty obstruction |
_will_ constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word |
I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography. |
I shall act as a sort of historian for this small town; associating |
with its inhabitants, and striving to acquaint you with its youths, |
in such a way that you can look, knowingly, upon any child, rich |
or poor; forward or "backward;" your own, or John Smith's, in your |
community. You will find many young minds aspiring to know how, and WHY |
such a thing is so. And, if a child shows curiosity in that way, how |
ridiculous it is for you to snap out:-- |
"Oh! Don't ask about things too old for you!" |
Such a jolt to a young child's mind, craving instruction, is apt so |
to dull its avidity, as to hold it back in its school work. Try to |
look upon a child as a small, soft young body and a rapidly growing, |
constantly inquiring brain. It must grow to maturity slowly. Forcing a |
child through school by constant night study during hours in which it |
should run and play, can bring on insomnia; handicapping both brain and |
body. |
Now this small town in our story had grown in just that way:--slowly; |
in fact, much _too_ slowly to stand on a par with many a thousand |
of its kind in this big, vigorous nation of ours. It was simply |
stagnating; just as a small mountain brook, coming to a hollow, might |
stop, and sink from sight, through not having a will to find a way |
through that obstruction; or around it. You will run across such a |
dormant town, occasionally; possibly so dormant that only outright |
isolation by a fast-moving world, will show it its folly. If you will |
tour Asia, Yucatan, or parts of Africa and Italy, you will find many |
sad ruins of past kingdoms. Go to Indo-China and visit its gigantic |
Ankhor Vat; call at Damascus, Baghdad and Samarkand. What sorrowful |
lack of ambition many such a community shows in thus discarding such |
high-class construction! And I say, again, that so will Youth grow |
dormant, and hold this big, throbbing world back, if no champion backs |
it up; thus providing it with an opportunity to show its ability for |
looking forward, and improving unsatisfactory conditions. |
So this small town of Branton Hills was lazily snoozing amidst |
up-and-doing towns, as Youth's Champion, John Gadsby, took hold of it; |
and shook its dawdling, flabby body until its inhabitants thought a |
tornado had struck it. Call it tornado, volcano, military onslaught, |
or what you will, this town found that it had a bunch of kids who had |
wills that would admit of no snoozing; for that is Youth, on its |
forward march of inquiry, thought and action. |
If you stop to think of it, you will find that it is customary for |
our "grown-up" brain to cast off many of its functions of its youth; |
and to think only of what it calls "topics of maturity." Amongst such |
discards, is many a form of happy play; many a muscular activity such |
as walking, running, climbing; thus totally missing that alluring "joy |
of living" of childhood. If you wish a vacation from financial affairs, |
just go out and play with Youth. Play "blind-man's buff," "hop-scotch," |
"ring toss," and football. Go out to a charming woodland spot on a |
Dataset Card for Lipogram-e
Dataset Summary
This is a dataset of 3 English books which do not contain the letter "e" in them. This dataset includes all of "Gadsby" by Ernest Vincent Wright, all of "A Void" by Georges Perec, and almost all of "Eunoia" by Christian Bok (except for the single chapter that uses the letter "e" in it)
This dataset is contributed as part of a paper titled "Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio" to appear at COLING 2022.
This dataset and the works within them are examples of Lipograms, which are works where a letter or string is systematically omitted. Lipograms are an example of hard-constrained writing.
Supported Tasks and Leaderboards
The main task for this dataset is Constrained Text Generation - but all types of language modeling are suitable.
Languages
English
Dataset Structure
Data Instances
Each is extracted directly from the available pdf or epub documents converted to txt using pandoc.
Data Fields
Text. The name of each work appears before the work starts and again at the end, so the books can be trivially split again if necessary.
Data Splits
None given. The way I do so in the paper is to extract the final 20% of each book, and concatenate these together. This may not be the most ideal way to do a train/test split, but I couldn't think of a better way. I did not believe randomly sampling was appropriate, but I could be wrong.
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
One way that we could extract text from datasets that doesn't use the letter "e" in it would be to simply computationally parse through large existing datasets for blocks or sentences which don't have the letter "e" in them. Unfortunately, this is extremely unlikely to lead to coherent or meaningful text. Doing so over increasingly large blocks or spans is likely to result in fewer and fewer examples. While the preparation of such a dataset would be fascinating in its own right - it is more interesting from the perspective of fine-tuning language models to have large scale prose narratives which fulfill the given constraint. This constraint of omitting the letter "e" is attractive because several book length works exist which do this.
Source Data
Initial Data Collection and Normalization
Project Gutenberg
Who are the source language producers?
Ernest Vincent Wright Georges Perec Christian Bok
Annotations
Annotation process
None
Who are the annotators?
n/a
Personal and Sensitive Information
None
Considerations for Using the Data
There may be conversion artifacts. I noticed 3 cases of the letter "e" being hallucinated from the pdf conversion of "a void" that I had to fix manually. They were reading special characters as the letter "e", and were not due to the authors making mistakes themselves. This implies that at least a few OCR errors exist.
Social Impact of Dataset
These books have existed for a awhile now, so it's unlikely that this will have dramatic Social Impact.
Discussion of Biases
This dataset is 100% biased against the letter "e". There may be biases present in contents of these works. It's recommended to read the books before using this in any non research application to verify that they are not problematic.
Other Known Limitations
It's possible that more works exist but were not well known enough for the authors to find them and include them. Finding such inclusions would be grounds for iteration of this dataset (e.g. a version 1.1 would be released). The goal of this project is to eventually encompass all book length english language "e" lipograms.
Additional Information
n/a
Dataset Curators
Allen Roush
Licensing Information
MIT
Citation Information
TBA
Contributions
Thanks to @Hellisotherpeople for adding this dataset.
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