Book of Mormon (er, -- of Solomon)

[_Roger]

UD:

I can only offer my best guesses, but, since that rarely stops me....

Imagine such an event, upon a real battlefield, where real generals move their troops. It is a total absurdity. Even if a few scouts fell into the canal, the regular forces would never end up in such a predicament.

Couple possibilities....

1. Spalding was a war veteran... perhaps he experienced some serious battles in which he saw some pretty traumatic things. His attempts at popularizing bloodless wars and absurd strategies (that nevertheless work) is perhaps his way of making sense of war or giving it meaning--either that or simply taming it down for public consumption.

I tend to think, rather, something along the lines of this...

2. Just go to the movies and you'll see any number of totally absurd scenarios playing themselves out. Spiderman, Batman, Mission Impossible, etc, etc--the heroes in these movies--even in the ones like Mission Impossible where the hero is supposedly a mere mortal--repeatedly pull off impossible stunts. Nearly everyone above Jr High school age knows these types of things just don't happen in real life, but they still pay to go see these movies. So these may be Spalding's 19th century attempts at creating larger than life characters.

As to why the repetition of themes... I'm stumped on that other than perhaps Spalding just couldn't come up with new ideas so he merely redressed old ones. We know that toward the end he was writing with a bit more desperation.... his financial situation was closing in on him and he needed to finish his novel and get is published, so perhaps he simply recycled old themes to fill pages.

Do you see what I'm driving at?

Ummm... yeah, you want me to read Spalding's mind. Now where did I leave my seer stone?

[_Roger]

Ben:

Certainly the smaller vocabulary has something to do with it. Most books of that size have a vocabulary of 10-12 thousand words. Comparing Spalding in this way to an increasingly smaller piece of text will only further change the results. I.E. comparing Spalding to just Alma gives us a vocabulary overlap of 76.8% (This drop would probably be larger if the Book of Mormon had a larger vocabulary).

Now, while you are thinking about the rather small drop (considering how much of the text we just loss), consider this - the top most used shared words are:

the, of, to, a, in, their, his, with, he, was, they, that, as, were, for, be, which, this, and, our, by, on, had, it, but

Those 25 words are used 12,844 times in Spalding - or roughly 34.7% of all of the words in Spalding's text. If we expand this to include the top 100 words, this jumps to 51.6%. Since these are all going to occur both in Alma and in the rest of the text, reducing the text in question isn't going to eliminate the vast majority of the verbiage in common - it will, however, dramatically reduce the number of rarer words in common. So, in going to just Alma, we drop from 2227 unique words in common to 1686. And these 541 vocabulary words that are lost only make up 4.5% of the total words in Spalding's text.

I'm trying to keep up with this, but numbers really aren't my thing. If I am reading the numbers right, it appears that Dale's numbers come in at or above the numbers for Twain-Twain--despite apparently higher numbers for Warren-Ramsay. Is that accurate or am I misunderstanding the numbers?

[_Uncle Dale]

...
Couple possibilities...
...

19th century "Mock epic" was more like the TV Batman series than "Mission Impossible"
Solomon Spalding may have been parodying Virgil, MacPhearson, Southey, etc.
???

...
you want me to read Spalding's mind.
...

Not just Spalding's mind, but Rigdon's also.

I have this paranoid feeling that Ben is going to run the numbers
on Rigdon, and his "voice" is going to come out much "weaker"
than Jockers represents it in the Book of Mormon.

I'm trying to prepare myself for that, by looking into new sub-theories,
or new branch theories.

Spalding's episodes in the Roman story range from serious to comically absurd,
but are mostly semi-ridiculous. The Book of Mormon is something very different.
Is it less of an obvious parody because Rigdon "cleaned up" its absurdities? --
or did Spalding succeed in making his anti-religious sarcasm truly subliminal?

Unless we come up with some additional "theory," I'm afraid Ben is poised
to shoot us out of the water with "Rigdon is not like the Book of Mormon" statistics....

Or, am I being too uneasy over nothing? Have we already proved our case?

Uncle Dale

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dale - before we get too excited, I want to remind you what my position is in this thread - it is that this kind of tabulation isn't useful to answer the kinds of questions we are trying to pose. In the one case of known plagiarism which I tabulated (Warren/Ramsay) they figures were so remarkably high that this kind of look warrants continued investigation. In the other cases, this kind of approach doesn't give us something remarkable.

If we were to look at Rigdon (which I will get to at some point in the next bit), we are going to find the numbers to be low when we take the Book of Mormon as a whole. If we only use the Book of Mormon sections identified by Jockers, et al., we will naturally get a higher ratio. But, I don't think it will reach anywhere near the levels of Warren/Ramsay. While the Twain/Twain had a relatively high overlap of 4 word strings (1.15% and 1.84% of all unique 4 word strings for the two texts), this was nothing close to the Warren/Ramsay higher result of 4.4%. And this suggests to me that you are more likely to find direct plagiarism with a tool like this, and much less likely to find evidence of textual reliance in a less direct way.

[_Uncle Dale]

...But, I don't think it will reach anywhere near the levels of Warren/Ramsay.
...

Maybe Roger will help whistle me past that grave-yard.
Or maybe I'll have to concede a point or two...

We shall see.

I'd like to see Jockers' comparison of Rigdon's word-print with the "Lectures on Faith,"
but he's busy now looking at canonical texts, with his newly developed Joseph Smith word-print.

I feel like I'm stuck in a slow-motion movie effect.
But I'll try be patient.

UD

[_MCB]

The canal is then covered over with timber and dirt, supposedly creating the
illusion of solid ground. Bombal's army all fall into the canal,when they attempt
to cross over that seeming solid ground. Bombal's troops all end up in the
muddy, shallow waters of the canal, completely at Lobaska's mercy. They
are defeated without the loss of a drop of blood.

But something like this occurs in Clavigero. And it certainly was not bloodless. And that is what makes it believable.

I think Spalding may have seen himself as somewhat of a bumbler, even in his military career. Unfortunately, Rigdon did not have that kind of humility. I cannot see that poem as having been by Rigdon. Surely a poem presenting the "last day", if written by Rigdon, would have more anti-Catholic rhetoric?

This whole situation, with stalls and delays, is clearly like a slow-motion movie. Very frustrating.


I totally agree that some of the textual parallels between Clavigero and the Book of Mormon are accidental. However, the sheer number is overwhelming. I will have to review Ben's article.

[_Danna]

Uncle Dale,
I have been looking over all your workings lately, I am not sure why you combine the vocab overlap and the word-string ratio. It seems to me that it would be better to keep them separate - the word strings have more significance that the vocab - just my point of view from marking work done by students.

Also, here's a word-string I wish had made the Book of Mormon:

Not such as brought us over mountain billows to this butt end of the world.

Old Solomon had a way with words!

[_Uncle Dale]

...I am not sure why you combine the vocab overlap and the word-string ratio.
It seems to me that it would be better to keep them separate - the word strings
have more significance that the vocab...

There is some method in my madness. The quantity of the shared word-strings
on any particular Book of Mormon page is more directly tied to the subject matter there
presented, than is the raw vocabulary count. I can find three or four or five
"Spaldingish" pages in a row, in the 1830 Book of Mormon, based upon their shared
vocabulary with Spalding -- but within that set the tabulated word-string
count may vary widely. Thus, while the shared vocabulary is telling me that
some particular range of pages could have been written by Spalding, the
variation in shared word-strings presents a confused picture of authorship.

All this is due to the limited scope of subject matter in Spalding's Roman story.
Where the Book of Mormon story does not mirror the Roman story subject matter, the
lack of shared word-strings provides the appearance of non-Spalding text.
But the raw vocabulary count, coupled with Jockers' authorship attributions,
tells me that the variation in shared word-strings is not an especially
reliable method of discerning Spalding's input.

Therefore, I demote the word-string data to a second class status. If we
had a tremendous amount of Spalding's fiction to consult, I might think
differently. But the way I'm combining the data calculations now seems
about right to me.
UD

[_Roger]

Once again, very little time to participate in this discussion, but I wanted to at least get this in....

Ben wrote:

While the Twain/Twain had a relatively high overlap of 4 word strings (1.15% and 1.84% of all unique 4 word strings for the two texts), this was nothing close to the Warren/Ramsay higher result of 4.4%. And this suggests to me that you are more likely to find direct plagiarism with a tool like this, and much less likely to find evidence of textual reliance in a less direct way.

This sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me. This is why I suggested comparing two works by the same author. I suspect, the results can even swing wider if we were to find two works written by the same author but on very different subjects. Apparently the Warren-Ramsay scenario offers a lot of direct copying. If there is a lot of this going on I can certainly see why a particular author's work can look closer to the one he/she is copying than to his/her own work on a different topic.

If we apply this to the claims of S/R the results fit since S/R does not make the claim that the Book of Mormon is a direct copy of Spalding's RS or even that sections are direct copies. Instead we appeal to a non-extant manuscript. Of course to skeptics, this is taken as a convenient excuse. In any event, word-string overlap comparison is apparently not a very reliable method for determining authorship due to the potential level of variance between two topics.

Having said that, I still see value in considering the thematic parallels and then noting similar word-strings within them--especially if they cluster or appear in similar chronology. At some point--IMO--these combinations become too overwhelming to be attributed to coincidence. I don't know if this can be measured very well by a computer, however.

I just noticed that Ben responded to my earlier posts and I must have missed them. Sorry. Too busy this time of year! In any event, I will respond as time allows.

All the best.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
If we apply this to the claims of S/R
...

Ben is currently is a position to do some Rigdon/Rigdon comparisons.

What will we all do, if he casts significant doubt upon the 1863 book's
text having been written by Rigdon himself?
http://sidneyrigdon.com/books/Appl1863.htm

The 1863 "Rigdon" book forms the bulk of Jockers' base-text for
determining a Rigdon word-print. If Rigdon did not write that book
(which does not have his name on the title page as the author)
then Jockers' entire published study is worthless for Rigdon.

We are also able to do Rigdon/Rigdon comparisons for the lengthy
anonymous article, "Millennium," which Jockers also added to his
Rigdon base text. But I've heard at least one scholar speculate
that "Millennium" looks more like Parley Pratt's writings than Rigdon's.

What will we all do, if further study casts significant doubt upon the
"Millennium" text having been written by Rigdon himself?
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/RigWrit/RigWrit3.htm

remaining just a little worried....

UD