Xanadu meme
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[This is a guest post by Bill Benzon]
I thought you’d be interested in a study showing the distribution of “Xanadu” across the web. I first looked into this back in 2010. I’ve now updated that work using ChatGPT o3 (one of the so-called “reasoning” models). It designed the study and executed it.
This report ran all night. And it’s the kind of thing that would have been impossible prior to the internet. Here’s the abstract:
I treat a single word, Xanadu, as a “meme” and follow it from a 17th century book to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"), into the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie (Citizen Kane), an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu), another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu, and a few other events. The aggregate result is that many occurrences of “Xanadu” fall into clusters that resonate with one of these founding events. Thus while some occurrences are directly related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related to these other events and thus only indirectly to Coleridge’s poem. For example, one large cluster of Xanadu sites is high tech while another cluster is about luxury and excess. Fifteen years ago I used manual methods to identify these clusters and estimate their sizes. Now I use ChatGPT o3 to update that work and to create a methodology for identifying other terms with similar distributions.
(source)
Selected readings
- "Desultory philological, literary, and historical notes on Xanadu" (4/4/23)
- "Hallucinations: In Xanadu did LLMs vainly fancify" (4/3/23)
- "This is the 4th time I've gotten Jack and his beanstalk" (3/15/23)
- "ChatGPT writes VHM" (2/28/23)
- "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23)
- "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-Trained Model" (1/25/2023)
- "ChatGPT writes Haiku" (12/21/22)
- "Translation and analysis" (9/13/04)
- "Welcome to China" (3/10/14)
- "Alexa down, ChatGPT up?" (12/8/22)
- "Detecting LLM-created essays" (12/20/22)
- "Artificial Intelligence in Language Education: with a note on GPT-3" (1/4/23)
- "DeepL Translator" (2/16/23)
- "Uh-oh! DeepL in the classroom; it's already here" (2/22/23)
- "Infinitely malleable electronic brain — software and hardware" (7/29/22)
- "Pablumese" (3/22/23)
- "Jipangu = Japan Country?" (10/19/20)
- Thomas T. Allsen, "Natural History and Cultural History: The Circulation of Hunting Leopards in Eurasia, Seventh – Seventeenth Centuries", In Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), pp. 116-135.
In the long history of human hunting, which extends over several millions of years, animal partners are a very recent development. Even the dog, humans’ first partner in the chase, was only domesticated sometime between 100,000 and 14,000 B.P. (Vilá et al. 1997, 1687 – 1689). The list of such hunting partners in the Old World is not long but includes, besides the dog, some very impressive animals: the horse, elephant, a variety of raptors, and several species of felines. My concern here is with the latter, most particularly the “hunting leopard” or cheetah.
Tim Leonard said,
July 10, 2025 @ 3:39 pm
You probably intended the URL to be an active link, but it isn't. And after the selected readings, you've (inadvertently, I expect) included a paragraph on another topic.
Victor Mair said,
July 10, 2025 @ 5:38 pm
@Tim Leonard
Link is live now.
Xanadu served as a royal hunting park for Kublai Khan and his successors.
Thomas Allsen was the premier historian of the Montolian royal hunt.
Greg Pringle said,
July 11, 2025 @ 2:21 am
I had a quick look but couldn't find the 1968 song "The Legend of Xanadu" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich"….
Phillip Helbig said,
July 11, 2025 @ 2:33 am
Maybe their best song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEuOoMprDqg
Michael Carasik said,
July 11, 2025 @ 2:44 am
A Garden in Xanadu
https://michaelcarasik.substack.com/p/a-garden-in-xanadu-gen-28?utm_source=publication-search
DJL said,
July 11, 2025 @ 4:26 am
Quite a random reference section…
Keith said,
July 11, 2025 @ 7:14 am
For more than a couple of minutes, I thought that the abstract presented was the outpouring of an LLM.
Victor Mair said,
July 11, 2025 @ 8:24 am
@DJL
Xanadu and AI being what they are….
Bill Benzon said,
July 11, 2025 @ 10:21 am
@Philip Helbig
I mention the Rush song, and many more examples, in my first paper on the Xanadu meme: One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme, https://www.academia.edu/8378900/One_Candle_a_Thousand_Points_of_Light_The_Xanadu_Meme
J.W. Brewer said,
July 11, 2025 @ 2:39 pm
It would be an interesting project to carve up my generational cohort of Americans based on whether they thought of the Rush "Xanadu" or the Olivia Newton-John "Xanadu" first, and to quantify what factors correlated with which. (I thought of ON-J first even though I suspect I would generally fall in the more Rush-leaning demographic subgroups, so I wouldn't expect it to be a 50/50 split.)
I have known lots of Americans with quite obscure/niche musical tastes but I can't say I've ever met an American aficionado of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. I think I might have first heard of them as a teenager while staying in West Germany, where their continuing fame in the early Eighties rivaled that of many of the other leading UK Beat-Gruppen of the mid-Sixties.
Chas Belov said,
July 15, 2025 @ 8:22 pm
I'm American and have obscure musical tastes (see my Infectious Multilingual playlist on YouTube Music). The only Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich song I was even aware of is Zabadak, which is mostly a bunch of made-up words, although not as many such words as Adrian Celentino's song Prisencolinensinainciusol.