# Bolívar, Márquez, and the Machine: publication checklist

This is a formatting draft for The Lemur, not a rewritten or fact-checked article. The submitted PDF remains the authority for the author’s wording and numerical results.

## WordPress settings

- **Title:** Bolívar, Márquez, and the Machine
- **Author:** Nathan Hertzberg. Assign the correct contributor profile rather than leaving the editor’s account as the author.
- **Suggested categories:** Criticism & Culture and History & Civilization. Both are existing sections on [The Lemur](https://thelemur.org/).
- **Suggested slug:** `bolivar-marquez-and-the-machine`
- **Optional excerpt, newly drafted:** What can a machine tell us about García Márquez’s dying Bolívar? A distant reading of The General in His Labyrinth explores the promise and limits of computational literary analysis.
- **Featured image:** Not selected. The six supplied charts remain in the author’s original order. Choose a separately cleared image or use one of the author’s figures only after confirming the desired homepage treatment; avoid repeating it as an extra hero inside the article.

## What changed

- **Presentation:** Removed “An Adapted Final Project” as a subtitle, removed “Introduction,” and replaced “Conclusion” with a divider. The full adaptation acknowledgment and all substantive section headings remain.
- **Copy:** Retained the argument and paragraph sequence. Rejoined page-break continuations, removed line-wrap hyphenation, repaired joined words such as “whileAFINN” and “LDAfell,” and changed the malformed “Iturbide- three” to “Iturbide: three.”
- **Typography:** Applied consistent book-title italics and code formatting for `General_TITLE`. Capitalized “I” in the Cauteruccio citation title.
- **Table:** Preserved every value, added thousands separators to word counts, and changed the header “Title” to “Opening phrase” to reflect the author’s explanation that the chapters are untitled. The table scrolls horizontally on small screens.
- **Figures:** Exported all six original chart compositions at high resolution, without redrawing or changing their data. Added descriptive alt text and short captions. The original sentiment comparison remains a single side-by-side figure.
- **Citations:** Converted all 17 footnotes to linked endnotes with return links. The separate bibliography was consolidated into those notes to avoid repeating the same references; all 11 unique works remain represented. URLs are transcribed from the submission and have not undergone a source-by-source verification.
- **House precedent:** The Lemur’s [Voltaire adaptation](https://thelemur.org/2026/01/05/voltaires-antisemitism-an-adapted-final-paper/) uses an opening course acknowledgment and a bibliography. This draft keeps the acknowledgment while retaining more precise claim-to-source links through endnotes.

## Ask Nathan before publishing

These are visible consistency checks, not a completed external fact-check. No substantive corrections have been made without the author.

- **Translation year:** The body identifies the analyzed text as the 1990 Knopf edition, while the citation gives 1989. Confirm the actual edition used and align the citation.
- **“Fernando” identification:** Confirm which character or historical figure the token `fernando` represents. The prose identifies it as Fernando VII, but the graph alone does not establish that identification. The interpretation of the Fernando–Urdaneta–Iturbide cluster depends on it.
- **Evidence missing from this shortened version:** The conclusion discusses Palacios’s “gradual recession” and a thematic network connecting Bolívar with time and night. Those specific analyses are not displayed in the supplied figures. Restore the supporting figure or qualify/remove those summary claims with the author’s approval.
- **Strength of analytical claims:** Ask whether the data establish a worsening sentiment trend and increasing anticipation, rather than merely showing page-to-page fluctuations or raw chapter counts. The emotion heatmap uses counts, and chapter lengths vary. The conclusions should distinguish what the plots demonstrate from literary interpretation.
- **tf-idf explanation:** Ask the author to check the distinction between rarity across documents/chapters and rarity within one document. Preserve the existing explanation until he approves a correction.
- **Scope of scholarship:** Claims that almost no digital-humanities work exists on García Márquez, and none on this novel, need a current literature check or a narrower formulation.
- **Chart legibility:** The original tf-idf figure has crowded labels, particularly in the “The First Day’s Travels” panel. The exports preserve this rather than inventing new chart data. Request a larger, better-spaced export from the author’s plotting code if available.

## Upload procedure

1. Create a new draft post and enter the title. Set the contributor and categories separately.
2. Open `wordpress-draft.txt`, copy its contents, and paste into WordPress’s Code editor. The file contains article-body blocks, not a second title or byline.
3. Download and upload the six PNG figures from the preview. Replace each image’s relative `figures/...` path with its actual Media Library URL. Do not publish while any relative image path remains.
4. Check the numbered endnotes and return links in Preview. The table and notes use Custom HTML blocks; the main text, headings, images, and list use ordinary block markup.
5. On mobile, confirm chart-label legibility. Consider linking each image to its full-size Media Library file so readers can inspect dense charts.
6. Resolve the author queries, confirm featured-image credit/permission, and check that the displayed byline is Nathan Hertzberg.

The preview is not an exact reproduction of the live theme. It is a readable proof of the article’s content order, figures, table, and citation behavior; the live WordPress theme will supply its own typography.