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Written to Be Recognised: Athens 430 BC and Florence 1348 · Part I · Written to Be Recognised: Athens 430 BC and Florence 1348

Chapter 3. Data and methods

By RISCON Labs AI from 2 Skeptron records and the public-domain texts it reads · the records are modern summaries of historical episodes written for a platform · the readings through the works named are this study's interpretation · First edition · October 2026

AI-generated editorial illustration: An observer sits near a resting person beneath an ancient Greek colonnade.
Written to Be Recognised: Athens 430 BC and Florence 1348Opening
In this part
  1. 3.1 The primary texts
  2. 3.2 The platform records
  3. 3.3 The ledger
  4. 3.4 How the texts are read
In this part
  1. 3.1 The primary texts
  2. 3.2 The platform records
  3. 3.3 The ledger
  4. 3.4 How the texts are read

3.1The primary texts

The Athenian text is Book II, chapters 47 to 54 of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, read in two forms. The English is Richard Crawley's translation, first published in 1874, as served by Project Gutenberg; Crawley does not mark the Greek chapter numbers, and the passage runs from the end of the funeral year to the sentence "Such was the history of the plague." The Greek is the Oxford text edited by Henry Stuart Jones, as served by the Perseus Digital Library, with chapter and section divisions. Where this article gives the sense of the Greek in English, the English is this article's own.

The Florentine text is the Introduction to the First Day of Boccaccio's Decameron, from its rubric to the narrator's estimate of the dead. The English is J. M. Rigg's translation, first published in 1903, as served by Project Gutenberg. The Italian is the edition of Aldo Francesco Massèra (Bari, 1927), as transcribed and proofread by Italian Wikisource. Again, where this article gives the sense of the Italian in English, the English is this article's own.

All four files are clean transcriptions; none is marked as uncorrected optical character recognition. Quotations below are copied from them character for character, including Crawley's and Rigg's spelling.

3.2The platform records

Skeptron's records of the two cases are labelled HC1-ATHENS430 and HC4-FLORENCE1348; the study calls them The Plague at Athens and Florence 1348. Each record gives a dated event, a short scenario, a decision window, a list of unknowns, a notice and five questions with Skeptron's answers. Each also names the public source it checked: for Athens, a translation of the plague chapters on Fordham University's sourcebook site (the record names it Fordham IHSP), under the title "Thucydides 2.47–55 · Plague in Athens"; for Florence, the same site's "The Black Death in Florence in the Prologue to the Decameron". Those are not the files read in this article, and the Athenian record's span runs one chapter further.

The records are modern summaries written for the platform. They are not archival documents and not translations of the texts; they are Skeptron's readings of public sources, written in Korean and translated into English once for the study. They are not synthetic scenes: both describe a real text. Their wording mentions a synthetic control group kept apart from the record, which this article does not use.

Each record also carries a set of sentences that recur, with only names and dates changed, across Skeptron's history cases. The study calls these the frame. They are Skeptron's method, written into case after case, not findings about a case. One example, from the Athenian record:

Announcement, decision, implementation, and outcome are not merged into the same event.
The Plague at Athens, Scenario

Such sentences are not read below as evidence about either case. The fourth question of every record checks a calendar and says nothing about the event; it is not used.

3.3The ledger

The study from which this article is drawn built a ledger of its eighty-nine cases. In plain terms, each record was read twice by the same automated coder, independently, against a set of questions registered before the reading began: whether the record shows a public act on disease, of what kind, whether the act came before its cause or effect was established, whether the record names a gap in time between the event and its notice or count, whether it gives a count, whether it names who bore the harm while the act waited, and whether it names a later finding that would change how the act should be read. Where the two readings agree, the value is settled; where they differ, it is unsettled. The ledger reads only the records. Its values for the two cases are in the appendix and are used once, in the discussion.

3.4How the texts are read

Each text is read in its own order, asking of each passage whether the author claims to have seen it or reports it as said, agreed or believed; whether it offers a sign; whether it gives a time, a place or a count; and whether the English and the original agree. The records are brought in after the text.

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