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.