Tracking the “Xanadu” Meme

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/130470494/Tracking_the_Xanadu_Meme
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5346920
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393569547_Tracking_the_Xanadu_Meme

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 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.

Background: Tracking Down the “Xanadu” Meme 2
“Xanadu” as Meme 2
The Origin, Growth, and Structure of the Xanadu System 3
Xanadu Meme Dynamics, 1999–2025: Methodology and Findings 8
Calibrating the Results 10
What Other Terms Would Have Traceable Lineages? 11
Meta: Man and Machine 12
Appendix 1: Donald Trump and the Xanadu Meme 13
Appendix 2: The Xanadu Mandala 14
References 16

Background: Tracking Down the “Xanadu” Meme

Sometime early in January of 2005 I did a Google search on the term “Xanadu,” which is the second work in Coleridge’s well-known poem, “Kubla Khan.” I had no particular expectations about what would turn up, but I was nonetheless surprised that I got roughly 2,000,000 “hits.” How did this one word from an early 19th century English poem, albeit a relatively well-known one, end up on approximately 2,000,000 pages of the World Wide Web in the early 21st century?

Over the course of days, if not weeks, I ran a bunch of queries on the web, analyzed on the results, and produced a post, “One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: Moretti and the Individual Text.” I subsequently refined that work and published a working paper (Benzon 2010). The paper argued that the current distribution of “Xanadu” is the result of four key events ranging in time from Coleridge’s publication of “Kubla Khan” in 1816 to Olivia Newton-John’s 1980 movie and hit-song, “Xanadu.” Each of those events marks the origin of cluster of occurrences of “Xanadu” having a particular vibe or resonance.

From time to time I would think about updating that original work, but always decided that I just didn’t want to do the tedious work that would entail. Then, a couple weeks ago, I was doing something with ChatGPT o3 where I had cause to upload my paper. In the course of commenting on whatever it was, ChatGPT asked whether or not I wanted to redo that original work. “Not now,” I said, but I kept the possibility in mind.

Finally, in the middle of June 2025 I decided to take ChatGPT o3 up on the offer. The study ran all night and confirmed that the clusters I had identified in my original study still stood. The purpose of this paper is to present the new results. The next two sections present a highly condensed version of my original paper. Then we have ChatGPT’s report of its study, followed by a methodology for identifying terms with similar distributions.