Lee Goddard's Homepage

About Me

Since 2000 AD I have worked as a freelance developer of Internet-based software. I have worked with companies large and small, private, public, state-owned, parent-owned, high-performing, low-performing, and two very large organisations that had explicitly banned weapons because of very unhappy staff.

Accurate photographic picture of the artist trying to focus on Dave Smith's frets once upon a Sziget.

Photograph by Mark Milstein of NorthFoto.

My academic background for my Master's degree from Sussex was in artificial intelligence knowledge-based systems, and involved self-organizing systems, hand-coded neural networks for pattern recognition, porting a meta-language called DATR, and coding in Prolog, POP-11, C, Java, JavaScript, and Perl. I chose not to take a PhD in AI as then had little interest in missile guidance, but these days I work with embeddings, FAISS and RAG, like everyone else, with a particular interest in investigating semantic drift in early printed matter.

For the past decade or so I have focused on Typescript and ECMA Script, though I do often write Python and increasingly Julia. Never Perl. Tiny units of functionality are my daily objective, their ordering and clustering that of my weeks and months.

My bachelor's degree is in English Literature, with a special interest in Samuel Becket and George Orwell. I was fortunate to study Millenarianism with the late great Willy Lamont, and both Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad with the wonderful and witty and also sadly departed Cedric Watts.

Outside of work my main interst is music: Hungarian/US folk, rock and metal, and studying orchestral composition. I play various guitars, oud, sitar; I read widely (Camus and English civil war history atm), enjoy mountains, woods, and lakes, and suffer adopting stray cats.

Now that my eldest is in her third year of college and my youngest about to start his final years at secondary school, I no longer have to dedicate so much time to commuting across Europe and hope instead to spend more time on research.

— Budapest, Gödöllő

if we understood their language, we would recognise we have been here before

Mutatis Mutandis on GitHub

Privacy is not a modern word. In the 1590s it appears in English with the meaning “a private or personal matter, a secret,” and shortly thereafter developed the sense of seclusion or retirement from company.

That usage reflects earlier Middle English forms such as privauté, privatie, priveté, pryvete, and privitee, derived through Anglo-French/Old French privauté from Latin privatus. These forms were used to signify hidden matters, secrets, secret acts, and states of being apart from public observation — including forms of intimacy, often amorous.

The specifically modern sense of privacy as a “freedom from intrusion or interference” does not appear until the early nineteenth century (OED, privacy, n., sense 3; first examples from 1814).

Accordingly, a lexical search through the surviving historical corpora of English law would not uncover the word privacy in any document surrounding the 1765 case of Entick v Carrington, a case that is now frequently understood through the language of privacy because it protected interests that later became central to privacy law: the security of personal papers, the home, and freedom from arbitrary intrusion.

Similarly, a search through historical literature for terms such as “child abuse” or “wife beating” might lead a naive researcher to conclude that these are modern phenomena, or at least that they were not recognised in earlier periods.

Turning the question around: wWho today is using the concept of liberty as it was used by Milton, or Hobbes, or Locke?

Repeatedly, at certain points in the historical record, new terms emerge not necessarily to describe entirely new ideas, but to gather together and name a range of experiences, practices and legal or social concerns that had previously been expressed through different vocabularies. Those earlier terms were themselves products of historical development and were not always the ordinary language of their time.

My project allows a user to trace these moments change to produce a kind of lineage that enables modern researchers, academic and lay alike, to locate historical examples of phenomena that may have been described using terms unfamiliar to contemporary readers.

¹ This is not intended to diminish cultural continuity through long-lived texts and traditions such as the Bible.

The Hero's Journey

Through the 17^th Century Civil War
to the Glorious Revolution

“Salus populi solus rex”

(From an unlicenced publication written by an author unable to provide his name because England has never had the "proud tradition of freedom of speech" that some claim. Published in London, October 17, 1648 — Thomason Tracts collection E.467, EEBO Document A91273, ID 99863437)