scriptorium

scriptorium

Single-responsibility AI skills that work on prose the author has written. Each skill reads a shared editorial state file and is grounded in a curated, peer-reviewed evidence base.

Scriptorium is a collection of focused AI skills — citation audit, reviewer simulation, argumentative-flow analysis, terminology normalization, page-limit compression, and ten more — that coordinate around a single editorial-state file (MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml). It is built for authors revising their own manuscripts and grants who want structured, anchored critique on prose they have already written.

Documentation site: https://seandavi.github.io/scriptorium/ (includes a worked case study showing real reviewer-simulation output and a before/after argumentative-flow run).

What scriptorium does

• Reads prose the author has already declared and emits structured, anchored findings — one finding per claim, one per section, one per figure-text mismatch. No overall quality score. No letter grade.
• Grounds every design decision in a curated knowledge layer (fifty-plus notes on citation accuracy, hallucination evidence, reviewer-archetype research, reporting guidelines, the AI-writing failure-mode literature). Each skill's manifest.yaml cites the knowledge notes its design comes from.
• Preserves what the author owns. Critique skills modify nothing. Transformation skills operate under an explicit preservation contract (citations, statistics, declared terminology, declared core claims, hedging style — see voice preservation).
• Refuses to invent. No skill adds a citation. No skill drafts a section from a blank page. The declared-work-scope convention is enforced across every conversation-bearing skill.

What scriptorium will not do

These are explicit non-goals, grounded in the roadmap and the knowledge layer. Naming them up front is the point — a pre-submission tool earns trust by being concrete about its limits.

• No blank-slate prose generation. Scriptorium does not draft sections from nothing. The proposer role (Hayes 2012) is the author's; scriptorium occupies the translator and evaluator roles. See declared-work-scope.
• No autonomous reviewing. reviewer-simulation and desk-rejection-risk are author-side only. Editorial-side use violates ICMJE, NIH, and major-publisher peer-review policy, and the skills refuse to run on a manuscript the user did not author.
• No overall writing-quality score. No letter grade, no Flesch-Kincaid, no aggregate number. Those systematically misrate scientific prose and would be theater rather than information.
• No image-forensics or sleuth replacement. Bik-style figure integrity review, tortured-phrase detection, and statistical forensics (Carlisle, Statcheck, GRIM, SPRITE) require domain experts. Scriptorium is a pre-submission first pass.
• No reference-manager replacement. Citation audit works with the bibliography Zotero, Mendeley, Paperpile, or BibTeX already produced; scriptorium does not manage references itself.
• No discipline-specific defaults outside biomedical / clinical at v0.1–v0.3. The evidence base is biomedical-coded. Physics, CS/ML, mathematics, qualitative social science, and humanities defaults need per-discipline knowledge layers that don't exist yet — PRs welcome.
• No native .docx round-trip. Scriptorium operates on markdown-converted prose; tracked changes and Word field codes are not preserved through the conversion.
• No skill-degradation defence. Whether extended AI use atrophies the author's underlying skill is plausible but under-evidenced. The author retains responsibility for their writing.

Where scriptorium fits in the writing workflow

The seven lifecycle stages in MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml (outline → draft → review → revision → submission → post-submission → accepted) map onto four roles in Hayes' 2012 cognitive-process model: proposer, translator, evaluator, transcriber. Scriptorium occupies the translator and evaluator roles when the author has already proposed. It does not propose for the author.