This is just a test annotation in which I show you a link to the course syllabus, some italicized text, and some boldface text.

Victorian stairs, especially in servants' quarters, were notoriously narrow. And deadly!

This is a type of horse-drawn carriage).

This is a real historical event, called the Seige of Seringapatam. Here's the Wikipedia page that describes it. )

This is a test annotation! How cool is this?

This is one of the more well-known statistical techniques for modeling topics, or finding meaningful semantic fields of words.

This is interesting, since there aren't millions of words in English. So rather, what is being counted here as vocabulary includes misspellings, dialect, emoji, punctuation, numbers, and more.

To explain some more terminology: N-grams are groups of $n$ words, so 2-grams (bigrams) are groups of two words, like "United States," and 3-grams (trigrams) are groups of three words "the United States." A bigram model of a text represents the text in terms of its frequecies of bigrams.

Just translating some technical jargon here: my understanding is that "representations" in this context is almost always numeric representations, i.e., using numbers to represent words; "learning" is computational inference of these numbers, given an algorithm or a method for inferring them.

The PDF of this chapter draft was originally retrieved here on Jurafsky's own site, at Stanford.

This is so hilarious! An instance of translation, from legalese to ordinary speech and back.

Such a severe comparison!

This is so hilarious. There's no way something like this was a real charity. But there would have been similar sorts of Christian charities, I bet.

On this topic, here is a relevant music video.

While this was not a super unusual color metaphor, this is an interesting descriptor, since mahogany is a colonial hardwood, native to the Americas.

There's really quite a lot you could do to pull apart this phrase. First, why its vengeance? Is the Moonstone harmed in some way by being stolen? Or is it harmed by being used for a murder? And what could yours mean in this context? "Your family," probably, but what else? What's so interesting about "yours" here is precisely what it doesn't say.

It's a fun game to follow up on these intertexts, even a bit. If you read the page or so that this quote is extracted from, you'll see that it's when Crusoe is regretting the way he'd started to build a boat, before thinking about how to get it to shore. Betteredge's analogy, then, is that he's bitten off more than he can chew: he's agreed to write this narrative, but soon finds it a very serious undertaking, since there are a lot of details to relate.

Does this reference to chapter-and-verse (so to speak) remind you of anything?

Isn't this surprisingly precise? I guess it seems doubly so, since all the numbers are written out like that. Can you imagine writing a computer program, at some point, that could find text that contained dates and/or times?

Betteredege's self-description as a alternative type of scholar is so amusing. What kind of a scholar is this? Of Robinson Crusoe, certainly. At the same time, there's almost a defiant insistence that he is not superstitious. What is he trying to disprove here?

This battle, while less familiar to us, would have been familiar to Collins's original readers. Read more about it at the Wikipedia article, Siege of Seringapatam

This is just to call your attention to the annotation sidebar to the right of this document. Feel free to add any thoughts, comments, or observations you have here, by first highlighting the relevant text, and clicking "annotate." You may have to create a Hypothes.is account first, if you don't already have one, but it just takes a second. Looking forward to reading your comments!

This part is important! Don't skip it.

This may change, actually. If a different time is more convenient for everyone, we can move this, or split it into two sections.

We're talking about Yorkshire dialect and "nota bene" downstream in this thread.

If you look this up in Robinson Crusoe, you'll see that it extends a discussion of the capriciousness of Providence, which Betteredge has just been discussing.

This is so interesting. It's almost as if there's some magic in the rose, that whoever chooses it wins Franklin's heart. Also, roses are an interesting theme in this novel! Do you notice much else rose-related here?

Do you know?

Notice that they're often mentioned in the same sentence together. Can you imagine a program that could compute the distance, in words, between characters' names?

Can you guess the word?

Why is there a bottle of ink on the gravel walk?!

Herncastle blames his treachery on war and/or colonialism. At the same time, we imagine that the structure of colonialism does enable treachery like this.

These rhetorical questions feel didactic.

The keeping of a diary, besides being narratively convenient for Collins, is one of Cobbett's recommendations for young men.

This is an amazingly ironic juxtaposition: first Betteredge admits he didn't understand his lady, then he seems to gloat that he understands women well!

I laughed out loud when reading this again. I think Collins's joke is a jab at Cobbett, whose early 19th C take on morality would have seemed old-fashioned, even for the time in which this story was set. Here's Cobbett on finding a wife. It's worth reading a few pages.

DId anyone calculate how much time has elapsed since the loss of the diamond?

The Broadview edition gives us this table of where the original episode divisions were in the serialized version, and tells us that the first part ended here.

Another illustration from this 19th C edition

Here's an illustration from a 19th Century edition of The Moonstone found on Google Books.

We are conditioned from the beginning to believe that the moonstone is cursed, especially since it is being used to adorn a potential murder weapon!

Isn't this an interesting stance with regard to the Hindu religion? The narrator presents this from almost a believer's point of view, such that we, the readers, tend to believe it, as well.

It is interesting to me that the narrator here says "these lines," instead of "these sentences." And why doesn't he specify where in Indian he is writing from?

This is a test annotation! How great is this?

Betteridge is calling attention to the material (in writing) nature of this account here, as if it were a legal or scientific document. Is this an aspect of his insistence on his story's truth?

This is an interesting mini-mystery or pre-mystery, isn't it? Even before we get to the main mystery (the loss of the diamond), we are primed by the uncertainty of this murder. Of course, it doesn't look good for the suspect here.

Compare strong accent of l1.

Competing parentages

metrical depression

Personification, one of Milton's major modes.

Begins with a strong accent.

Atkinson suggests that this hat is a symbol of Laura's coming-of-age, that it will mark Laura as "no longer a child." The term "becoming" here, while ostensibly "beautiful" or "suitable," in this reading resonates with Laura's becoming an adult.

The word "turban" may be etymologically related to "tulip." That is is green enhances this botanical reference, and adds another image of floral blooming that resonates with the theme of sexual awakening.

This is also the second appearance of the word "green" in the story.