5.0 KiB
name, description, metadata
| name | description | metadata | ||||
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| ARC chamber-library — Auerbach Mimesis acquisition debt | RESOLVED 2026-05-20 ~10:25 — steward provided a clean PDF source (22MB, Xerox-scanned + Acrobat-Distilled, 530 pages, valid text layer); pdftotext + custom heading-promotion produced a clean MD with all 20 chapters as H1. Filed at traditions/critical_modernity/literary_criticism/mimesis-auerbach.md. The .mobi failure is preserved below as forensic record + the conditions under which mojibake sources should be rejected. |
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Auerbach Mimesis — acquisition debt — RESOLVED 2026-05-20
RESOLVED 2026-05-20 ~10:25. Steward provided a clean PDF source at /Users/davidglidden/Documents/___The Library [ePub_AWZ3]/New texts may 2026/Mimesis_Dargestellte_Wirklichkeit.pdf (22MB, Xerox DSMR + Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5, 530 pages, valid text layer). Pipeline: pdftotext (clean German text extraction) + /tmp/clean_mimesis.py (heading promotion + running-head/page-number cleanup, generalised and saved to chamber-library/scripts/clean_pdf_running_heads.py). Output: 17,375 lines / 210,079 words / 21 H1 (20 chapters Die Narbe des Odysseus → Der braune Strumpf, + Register). Filed at traditions/critical_modernity/literary_criticism/mimesis-auerbach.md. The original .mobi failure is preserved below as forensic record.
Original memo — .mobi source failure (forensic record)
What happened
During the 2026-05-20 conversion session (8 texts staged for §4 Overlap and Resolution prose authoring), 7 converted clean. Auerbach's Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (German .mobi, 51MB) failed:
- Calibre
ebook-convertraisedSplitError: Could not find reasonable point at which to split: index.html Sub-tree size: 322 KB— the .mobi packages all content in a single oversized HTML file with no split markers. - With
--flow-size=0(skip splitting), Calibre produced a 1.1MB EPUB, but the body content is mojibake — encoding artifacts from a scan-OCR pipeline that didn't produce clean text. Sample (page-mid):«10g°ªÖ¼¸'»péjÕÊ€›) ÝÉÞßmžxË!ýô...— not Auerbach's German prose. pandoc -t gfm-raw_htmlon the Calibre EPUB produced 8628 lines / 32,738 words of mostly-mojibake text. 32K words is also very short for Mimesis (the actual book is hundreds of thousands of words), confirming the .mobi was primarily scanned page-images with broken OCR.
The .mobi's 51MB size is consistent with embedded high-resolution page scans + poor OCR text layers.
What's needed
A clean source for Auerbach Mimesis — one of:
- German EPUB from Suhrkamp Taschenbuch (paperback edition, well-typeset, clean text layer)
- English translation (Trask, Princeton 1953) EPUB — equally load-bearing for §4 prose authoring since the §4 supplementary-authority work cites Auerbach methodologically, not in a specific-language register
- Internet Archive scan with verified text layer if it exists in their collection — would need pdftotext / docling round-trip test before commitment
Why this matters
Auerbach is the named supplementary authority for the Gloss ⇌ Readings threshold (per the steward's three-threshold notes 2026-05-20):
"Erich Auerbach in Mimesis — every chapter is a textbook case of the threshold case, beginning as gloss on a passage and modulating into reading of an epoch. Watching him cross the threshold paragraph by paragraph is itself a methodological education."
For §4 prose, this means: if §4 wants direct-quoted Auerbach demonstration of the gloss → readings crossing, the chamber-library doesn't have a clean source. Either the §4 prose works from the steward's notes + general knowledge of Auerbach's method (acknowledged honestly per feedback-pandoc-epub-suppress-raw-html.md source-quality discipline), or Auerbach acquisition runs before §4 authoring.
Recommendation
Defer Auerbach to a separate small acquisition task (post-§4 prose authoring). The §4 prose can name Auerbach as supplementary authority and quote from the steward's notes; when a clean Auerbach source lands in chamber-library, §4 can be revised in a small follow-on commit per the Live-State Discipline (spec text records what IS).
Cross-references
- Three-threshold notes shared by steward 2026-05-20 morning (in conversation prior to conversion session)
feedback-pandoc-epub-suppress-raw-html.md— source quality determines retrieval qualityproject-epub-repair-pipeline.md— the pipeline that worked for 6 of 7 conversions todayfeedback-articulate-toolchain-fit-before-executing.md— per-text toolchain-fit diagnosis (in this case, the .mobi source itself failed before any toolchain question)- 2026-05-20 conversion session result: 7 of 8 staged texts converted clean (Palimpsestes, Seuils, Citadelle, Exercices, Philosophie, Austin, Szondi)
Filing
This memo lives alongside the other project-arc-*-pending.md files; entered into MEMORY.md if/when steward authorizes elevating to active acquisition task.