From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 12 May 1987, 23:50:02 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 1 (1) This is test number 1. Please acknowledge. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 13 May 1987, 00:06:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 2 (2) This is test number 2. Please acknowledge. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 13 May 1987, 23:08:57 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 3 (3) This is a test of a new BITNET mailer for people involved with the support of computing in the humanities. Please acknowledge receipt of this message. A more complete explanation and welcoming message will be forthcoming. Thanks very much. From: IAN@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 14 May 1987, 16:05:17 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 4 (4) Message received. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 14 May 1987, 20:17:18 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 5 (5) Welcome to HUMANIST HUMANIST is a Bitnet/NetNorth electronic mail network for people who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review software, answer questions, give advice, program, write documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this area are included. Although HUMANIST is intended to help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is primarily meant for discussion rather than publication or advertisement. In general, members of the network are encouraged to ask questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards. Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly different from the support of other kinds of computing, with which it may be confused. Perhaps you don't think so. In any case, let us know what you do think, about this or any other relevant subject. HUMANIST is one of the inaugural projects of a new special interest group for the support of computing in the humanities, which is currently applying for joint affiliation with the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Information about this SIG may be obtained by sending a message to George Brett (ECSGHB@TUCC.BITNET). Currently anyone given access to HUMANIST can send mail to all other members of the network without restriction. It is expected that the members will at least be civil to each other, however spirited the argument! New members are welcome, provided that they fit the broad guidelines described above. Please tell anyone who might be interested to send a note to me, giving his or her name, address, telephone number, university affiliation, and a short description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. I will then add that person to the list. If anyone should wish to be dropped from the list, please send a note to that effect. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 15 May 1987, 11:15:21 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 6 (6) My apologies for a recent flood of junk mail relating to a bad address for one of our members. Please bear with me while I figure out the arcane manners and methods of this very promising tool. From: JACKA@PENNDRLS Subject: Date: Friday, 15 May 1987 1536-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 7 (7) Query- Is this a LSERVER? If so, take a look at how Knut Hofland has set up his Bulletin Board....JACK From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 18 May 1987, 20:09:38 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 8 (8) For those of you who happen to know less than I do about the Bitnet facility that runs HUMANIST, I have just sent out a lengthy memo by Eric Thomas on the "revised List Processor," or ListServ. The memo lists commands available to you. Please note the section entitled, "How can I send commands to LISTSERV?" If you're as ignorant about these things as I was a few days ago, you'll need the help of some local expert. HUMANIST has, I'm happy to say, reached addresses on ARPA-net, uucp, and JANET (in the UK). It remains to be seen whether messages sent to HUMANIST from these networks will be successfully redistributed. I'll be asking one person from each to send a test message. This will mean, alas, more junk-mail, which I hope you will excuse. From: SUE ZAYAC Subject: Scholarly Information Journal Date: Mon, 18 May 87 09:51 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 9 (9) Hello: I've just sent a complimentary copy of the Columbia University "Scholarly Information Center Journal" to all of you whose names I had from the original meeting of the Ad Hoc SIC for Support Issues at USC in April. The SIC journal is published quarterly by the Columbia University Libraries and the Center for Computing Activities and features articles aimed at informing the scholarly community of available information resources and current trends in information technology. We are particularly trying to slant this towards the humanists, not the EE and CS people. If your name has been added to this mailing list since and you would like a complimentary copy of this journal send me mail, either here or to sue@cunixc.columbia.edu (for you unix buffs). The editor, Bea Hamblett has just pointed out to me that, although subscriptions are free to the Columbia community, there is a $10 subscription fee for others. The issue I sent you neglects to include this informaiton. If you would like to subscribe, send your money, name and address to: Bea Hamblett Editor, SIC Journal Academic Information Services Group Columbia University 612 West 115th Street New York, N.Y. 10025 Bea will also entertain suggestions for articles. If you have an idea of something you would like to contribute, send mail with your proposal (not the full article) to Bea at us.bea@cu20b.columbia.edu (P.S. Do not send jokes about the name of the journal. We've already heard them all.) Susan Zayac SLZUS 280-3724 ------ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 16 May 1987, 18:35:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 10 (10) The recent flood of junk mail you have received was due to what is called a "mailer loop," which is something like an echo that continually increases in volume. This loop began when a message was sent by HUMANIST to Joel Goldfield using a bad address (mea cupla!) and incorrectly returned by network software to HUMANIST, which then dutifully sent it out as a regular message to all members of the list, including Joel at his bad address.... Fortunately for us all, the alert network wizards at our Computing Services pounced on the echo and silenced it. These things happen, I'm told. My apologies. Next week I will be sending out information on the ListServ mailer that should allow you to do various things with it. As for now, you can enter the fray simply by sending a note to HUMANIST at UTORONTO.BITNET. Yours, W.M. From: JACKA@PENNDRLS Subject: Date: Wednesday, 20 May 1987 1520-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 11 (11) If anyone out there would like to receive the Online Notes from the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, please let me know electronically and I will add your name to the mailing list. Thank you. JACK ABERCROMBIE From: LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK Subject: test missage Date: 20-MAY-1987 18:09:05 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 12 (12) Here comes a copy of the test message I am about to send to HUMANIST at UTORONTO, cc: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS, so that you can see if messages from JANET are properly redistributed HONK BEEP! [A[A[A[A[A[A[A[A[A[A[A[A [10L [B[B[B [5m FLASH!!!![m [4h VT100s can be really [4l [But the last bit wont make much sense except on a VT100] L From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 20 May 1987, 08:29:50 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 13 (13) Our local network expert advises me that it would be much better for members of HUMANIST to request the document I said I was sending you (and didn't!) from the ListServ node nearest you. There is a real danger of burdening the network, apparently. The following list of locations may help. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 14 (14) UTORONTO - here CANADA01 - U of Guelph DEARN - Germany FRECP11 - France TAMVM1 - Tulane UGA - U of Georgia UIUCVMD - U of Illinois SUVM - Syracuse U HEARN - Holland BITNIC - Bitnet Network Center, NYC OREGON1 - Oregon IRISHVM1 - Ireland From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 15 (15) So, for example, if you're at Rochester, you don't want to ask UTORONTO's listserv to send information, since SUVM is much closer. So, you will likely want to ask your local expert to help you identify the nearest node, if it's not obvious from the above list (which is incomplete), and to figure out what commands are necessary in your system, for example, to get a copy of LISTSERV MEMO, which describes ListServ and its commands, and to get an up-to-date listing of the members of HUMANIST -- which is growing every day. From: ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: Tue, 19 May 87 21:15:37 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 16 (16) Willard; Thanks for all your efforts in this endeavour: they are bound to bear fruit in due course. Keep up the good work. Stuart From: Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 Subject: computer generated maps of the British Isles Date: 19 May 1987, 16:10:23 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 17 (17) This is a general plea. I realise that many people on this list will not have a great interest in computer-drawn maps, but if you know of anyone who does, or if you know of another list where such a person might see this note, please pass it on!! I have already posted this plea on the ENGLISH discussion started by Marshall Gilliland at UofSaskatchewan, and on CSNEWS at MAINE, so my apologies to anyone who has already seen it, and especially to those who have sent replies! Thank you, Abigail Young The Records of Early English Drama project here at Toronto, of which I am a part, are engaged in collecting, editing, and publishing any documents which offer external evidence for the production and performance of drama, music, folk drama, or semi-dramatic folk activities in the British Isles before 1642, when most such activities were banned by the Puritan Commonwealth. As an offshoot of this, we are eager to use this data, much of it previously unknown, to generate maps of late medieval and renaissance England to show the distribution of various dramatic or folk activities, and the touring routes of professional companies or actors and musicians during the period. Is there anyone out there who is interested in, or has experience with, this kind of mapping? At the moment, we are experimenting with a micro-based map-making package, MapMaster, but are still interested in finding out about other possibilities, especially those which are mainframe-based. I would be very glad to hear from anyone who has such interests, or who could put me in touch with others who might be. Thank you!! Abigail Ann Young (YOUNG@UTOREPAS) Records of Early English Drama 85 Charles Street West Victoria College University of Toronto From: RSTHC@CUNYVM Subject: Date: Tue, 19 May 87 16:00 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 18 (18) I have received your BITNET mail (obviously). This is the reply you requested. RST From: JMBHC@CUNYVM Subject: Date: Thu, 21 May 87 13:01 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 19 (19) Yes, could I would like to receive your On Line Notes. My mailing address s: Joanne M. Badagliacco Director, Academic Computing Services Hunter College, CUNY 695 Park Avenue New York, NY 10021 Thanks very much. From: JMBHC@CUNYVM Subject: Date: Thu, 21 May 87 13:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 20 (20) You might contact Dr. Keith Clark, Department of Geology & Geography, Hunter College, BITNET address: KCCHC@CUNYVM. This is his very area of expertise. Joanne Badagliacco From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 21 May 1987, 20:17:53 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 21 (21) Two HUMANISTs today have suggested to me that we need to have some understanding about what gets sent to everyone and what gets sent to individuals. Let me offer this rule: that specific answers to open queries should be sent directly to the questioner and NOT to everyone -- unless, that is, the answer is a particularly interesting one. The suggestion I got really points to the necessity for self-regulation so that we don't bury each other in junk mail. I'm particularly sensitive to this issue, since I indirectly managed to bury everyone in dartvax chatter last week. Any guidelines for the running or using of HUMANIST would be of interest to us all, I'm sure. Perhaps this could be a useful discussion. I'd very much appreciate comments on my new WELCOME MESSAGE and my first attempt at a user's guide to HUMANIST. These will be coming along shortly. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 21 May 1987, 20:32:37 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 22 (22) Welcome to HUMANIST HUMANIST is a Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN electronic discussion group for people who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review software, answer questions, give advice, program, write documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this area are included. Although HUMANIST is intended to help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is primarily meant for discussion rather than publication or advertisement. In general, members of the network are encouraged to ask questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards. Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly different from the support of other kinds of computing, with which it may be confused. Perhaps you don't think so. In any case, let us know what you do think, about this or any other relevant subject. HUMANIST is one of the inaugural projects of a new special interest group for the support of computing in the humanities, which is currently applying for joint affiliation with the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Information about this SIG may be obtained by sending a message to George Brett (ECSGHB@TUCC.BITNET). New members are welcome, provided that they fit the broad guidelines described above. Please tell anyone who might be interested to send a note to me, giving his or her name, address, telephone number, university affiliation, and a short description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. I will then add that person to the list. If anyone should wish to be dropped from the list, please send a note to that effect. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 21 May 1987, 20:33:03 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 23 (23) How to Use HUMANIST Currently anyone given access to HUMANIST can communicate with all other members without restriction. A member need not be on Bitnet but can use any comparable network with access to Bitnet. Thus, to send mail to everyone simultaneously, use whatever command your system provides (e.g., NOTE or MAIL) addressed to HUMANIST at UTORONTO. Your message is then sent by your local software to the UTORONTO node of Bitnet, where the "Revised List Processor" (or ListServ) automatically redirects it to everyone currently on the list of members. Restricted conversations or asides can, of course, develop from the unrestricted discussions on HUMANIST by members communicating directly with each other. This is particularly recommended for replies to general queries, so that HUMANIST and its members are not burdened with messages of interest only to the person who asked the question. If, for example, one of us asks the rest about the availability of software for keeping notes in Devanagari, suggestions should be sent directly to the questioner's e-mail address, not to HUMANIST. Please use your judgment about what the whole group should receive. We could easily overwhelm each other and so defeat the purpose of HUMANIST. Draconian methods are available for controlling a discussion group, but self-control seems preferable. This is not to discourage controversy -- quite the contrary -- but only what could become tiresome junk-mail. New members will be interested to know that ListServ at UTORONTO maintains an archive of messages for the past month. If you have just joined and want to know the recent history of discussions, enter the following command (or its equivalent on non-VM/CMS systems): TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET HUMANIST LOG8705 ListServ will then send you the contents of the monthly archive. ListServ accepts several other commands, for example to retrieve a list of the current members or to set various options. These are described in a document named LISTSERV MEMO. This and other documentation is available to you from your nearest ListServ node and is best fetched from there, since in that way the network is least burdened. You should consult with your local experts to discover the nearest ListServ; they will also be able to help you with whatever problems in the use of ListServ you may encounter. Once you have found the nearest node, type the following: TELL LISTSERV AT XXXXXX INFO ? The various documents available to you will then be listed. Suggestions about the running of HUMANIST or its possible relation to other means of electronic communication are very welcome. Please let me know what you think about these matters directly, at the address given below. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Thu, 21 May 87 23:59:13 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 24 (24) Is this the correct way to send stuff to HUMANIST? If so, can I make three suggestions as to the service, and add one genuine contribution. a) Those of us outside the IBM world are pretty much in the dark about what LISTSERV is.... (at least, I assume its IBMese 'cos it looks like nasty VM/CMS type commands). Could you, for the ignorant, explain what its all about? b) when I logged in tonight, I got 8 messages from HUMANIST which took a while to read and digest. And the thing has hardly started! Would not a weekly digest be more appropriate, such as other SIGs use? Otherwise I shall spend all my life reading mail! on the same tack, are copies of each of these messages really being sent individually across the Atlantic to readers in the UK? That seems pretty wasteful - could not someone in each country do a redistribution? c) would someone care to define an etiquette for contributions to this list? eg what is the maximum length a contribution should be? I ask because I am about to write a report on my last year's teaching of computing arts courses, which I would consider of vague interest to readers. If its 20 pages, I guess its too long, and obviously 1 page is fine - what about 6 pages? 8? How much are people prepared to read on a naasty orange VDU or whatever you have in front of you? d) Heres my real question, which I asked on the English HUMBUL bulletin board last year, and got no answers to. Do any of you out there teach Prolog in introductory courses to Arts students? if so, what do you set in the way of assignments? I need exercises for my students! sebastian rahtz From: "DD ROBERTS (PHILOSOPHY)" Subject: Date: Sat, 23 May 87 13:26:00 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 25 (25) In September I will be teaching a course in which material stored on the computer will be used as a textbook. The material is previously unpublished manuscripts of a philosopher. This is the first time I have tried anything like this, and I wonder if anyone would be willing to give me a few hints as to how best I might organize things like: access to the material, format of the material, and so on. Thanks. From: Leslie Burkholder Subject: Reading on-line Date: Sat, 23 May 87 17:22:36 edt X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 26 (26) You should probably print-out the material rather than have your students read it on-line. Some research (here, by Chris Haas) shows that reading for content is as good as reading from paper only when the screen is a black-on-white one with about 1000*1000 pixels. (These screens are found on Suns, eg.) Performance decreases when something like an IBM-PC screen is all that's available. In addition, there are problems in easily conducting searches in the text on-line (eg, Where did the author say something about that before?, What was the main point of this section supposed to be?) Leslie Burkholder From: Leslie Burkholder Subject: Prolog exercises for arts students Date: Sun, 24 May 87 18:06:23 edt X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 27 (27) How about the following? (1) Logic puzzles (the sort of thing found in many collections). These have the advantage of showing that Prolog programming is not pure logic programming. (2) A program that writes poetry (especially, haikus). An ELIZA program. (3) A parser for a fragment of English using Prolog definite clause grammars. (4) History databases and retrieval. Lots of stuff by people in various ways attached to the LCA micro-Prolog group at Imperial College (eg Richard Ennals). There are quite a few intros to Prolog written by people in this group but they are aimed, it seems, at primary and secondary rather than college students. (5) A spelling and grammar checker. (Distinguish "their" and "there"). (6) Something to play tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). (7) Various kinds of search problems (the farmer, the fox, the goose, and the grain; the waterjug problem). (I teach a logic and Prolog course to arts students.) Leslie Burkholder From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 25 May 1987, 00:13:40 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 28 (28) Members of HUMANIST continue to suggest to me that the flow of messages should be regulated by an editor, who would decide what should and should not be sent to the membership at large. I stubbornly continue to think that all members should be editors. So, I wonder, what do you want? To wait and see? To have an editor immediately? Let me propose an alternative. The immediate use of HUMANIST seems to be for asking rather specific questions, of great interest to the questioner but not so much, I suspect, to most others. My proposal is that all who reply to such a question should send their replies directly to the questioner, not to HUMANIST. The questioner would then gather together the responses, attach them to the original question, and post the results to HUMANIST, as he or she would see fit; or, perhaps, the questioner might offer the results to anyone who asks for them. McLuhan talked about the "global village"; we seem to be in the midst of one. As I know from living in a housing cooperative, making a suddenly created community work takes some thought and seems to involve much error. Which direction shall we blunder in? It has occurred to me that we could very effectively distribute reviews of software and other written work of interest among ourselves, using HUMANIST either before publication, as a means of getting comments, or as an indirect means of publication. So, another proposal: that we announce to the membership the availability of such things and then send them to whomever asks for them -- directly, not via HUMANIST. Since software tends to change so rapidly, electronic publication seems more suitable, though it still doesn't get as much credit. Are there any other such uses for HUMANIST? From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 26 May 1987, 23:03:02 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 29 (29) An interesting item available from our Computing Services: From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 30 (30) February 13, 1987 Academic's Guide to Microcomputer Systems Second Edition The University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) announces the second edition of the Academic's Guide to Microcomputer Systems, a book on the application of microcomputer hardware and software in academia. The Guide is written primarily by the UTCS Microcomputer Support Group and is addressed to both the complete novice and the experienced user, although the emphasis is on introductory explanations. This edition of the Guide comprises eight volumes, varying in size. Volume 1 contains material of an introductory and general nature. In its section on hardware, this volume presents a detailed treatment of the typical components of a microcomputer, including the enhancements commonly required for academic applications. It points out the many pitfalls of selecting a machine and suggests means of avoiding them. The section on software divides academic software by type and supplies for each a general discussion. Among several useful appendixes is an extensive glossary of terms. Volume 2, "Hardware Evaluations," contains brief reviews of various commercially available systems, while each of the remaining volumes covers a particular type of software, offering detailed reviews of several of the best packages. The reviews are not limited to listings of features and commands but attempt to describe the basic approach of the package in terms of its advantages and limitations for academic work. The publisher plans to issue new editions more or less annually. Each edition will be available to individuals in hardcopy and to educational institutions in electronic form via BITNET. Colleges and universities interested in distributing the Guide to their students and faculty may obtain it in electronic form free of charge. There are two requirements only: a BITNET/NetNorth address and agreement to certain minimal conditions by a site administrator with signing authority. BITNET/NetNorth enquiries should be directed to Dr Martha Parrott (PARROTT at UTORONTO). Printed copies of the Guide are available at CAN$21 for the complete set (Volume 1 is available in a loose-leaf binding for an extra $1.50). We regret that, for mail orders, the entire set must be purchased; add $3 per set for postage in Canada, $6 in the U.S., and $8 overseas. Please send the appropriate amount, in Canadian funds, to Ms. Dale Wright, Information Office, University of Toronto Computing Services, 255 Huron Street, Room 350, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1. From: LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK Subject: Date: 26-MAY-1987 17:56:55 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 31 (31) Do all Humanists know about the Oxford Text Archive? For those who don't, I am currently trying to find out how to send a copy of our snapshot (listing all our machine-readable texts) to the fileserver at Toronto so that you can get hold of it from there direct; if I fail, let me know and I'll mail you one direct. For those who do, since this is our tenth year (at least) of operation, I've been worrying about the future. There follows some of the fruits of this in the form of a proposed Code of Practice, designed to liberalise and maybe improve the facilities we currently offer. I'd be very grateful for comments, suggestions, reactions, advice on it before I start actually doing anything about it. Lou Burnard A CODE OF PRACTICE FOR A DIGITAL TEXT ARCHIVE Draft L.D. Burnard 24 May 1987 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Purpose The purpose of a digital Text Archive is to promote and facilitate the computational analysis of literary and linguistic texts for scholarly and educational purposes. To that end, the Archive provides facilities for the long term storage and maintenance of machine readable texts, publicises information about the existence and availability of such texts and encourages so far as possible the distribution of such texts on a scholarly and non-profit making basis. The Guidelines Depositors of texts in the Archive and users of texts obtained from it are required to conform to the following guidelines which together constitute the DITA Code of Practice. 1. To use the text for purposes of scholarly research only and not for profit. To publish in an appropriate scholarly context the results of analyses carried out using the text. Where requested, to make such analyses available to the depositor of the text in advance of publication. 2. To acknowledge in such publications or other work carried out both the original depositor of the text and the Archive itself. 3. Not to hold the Archive liable for any errors of transcription discovered in the text, but to notify the Archive of all such errors as soon as possible. 4. Whenever substantial alteration enrichment or revision of the text as received has been performed, to inform the Archive of the nature and scope of such alterations. To make any such revised version of the text available to the Archive for redistribution. 5. Not to incorporate the text or any derivative of it in any commercially distributed electronic or other form of publication, except when explicitly so licensed by the Archive or the depositor of the text. Access to texts Texts deposited with the Archive are assigned to one of five Accessibility Categories, each with its own characteristics as defined below. Wherever possible, depositors are urged to place texts in category F or U. The Archive may impose maintenance charges for texts in categories A, X and 0, but will maintain texts in categories F and U free of charge. The depositor is assumed to be the owner of the materials deposited with the Archive, or to have obtained appropriate permissions from the copyright owner. The Archive will not accept responsibility for any breach of copyright by the depositor. F. Texts in category F are freely available for scholarly purposes. Copies may be obtained from the Archive on payment of a small fee to cover material costs, provided that the above Code of Practice is observed by the recipient of the text. Such recipients may make further copies of the texts for re-distribution on a non-commercial basis only, provided that (a) no charge is made for such re-distribution other than to cover material costs (b) each such copy is accompanied by a copy of the Code of Practice (c) all subsequent users conform to the Code of Practice U. Texts in category U are also freely available for scholarly purposes. Copies may be obtained from the Archive on payment of a small fee to cover material costs, provided that the above Code of Practice is observed by the recipient of the text. A record will be kept by the Archive of all such copies issued, which will be made available to the depositor on demand. No further copies may be made by recipients of the text without further reference to the Archive. A. Texts in category A are subject to the same conditions as those in category U, with the additional proviso that copies will be issued only on receipt of written instructions from the Depositor, which should not however be unreasonably withheld. X. Texts in category X have been deposited with the Text Archive for the benefit of specified local (Oxford) users only. They may not be redistributed; wherever possible however the Archive will be able to identify a source from which potential users can obtain their own copies of such texts. 0. Texts in category 0 are deposited with the Archive for security purposes only. They are available to the Depositor only and their existence in the Archive will not normally be publicized. END OF DOCUMENT From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: HUMANIST NETWORK Date: Wed, 27 May 87 14:32:31 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 32 (32) KEITH CAMERON DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN UNIVERSITY OF EXETER EXETER EX4 4QH GB 392-264209 INTERESTED IN KEEPING ABREAST OF DEVELOPMENTS ON HUMANIST NETWORK. Have and am working of computer-assisted concordances and research into development of expert system for teaching/correction of French and French phonetics. From: JACKA@PENNDRLS Subject: Date: Wednesday, 27 May 1987 0955-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 33 (33) A number of you asked to be put on the mailing list for the Online Notes. If you have not received back issues of the Notes the reason is I cannot reach you electronically because the path out is not there! Please help me on this if you still wish to subscribe to the Notes....JACK From: ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: 28 May 1987, 09:17:05 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 34 (34) For the linguists, a neologism from computer land: When the system garbles a message, it can be said that the system GARBAGIFIED the message. . From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 29 May 1987, 23:26:24 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 35 (35) I have suggested in passing that HUMANIST could be used to distribute files as well as messages, e.g., reviews of software or other technical reports. With some prodding by a fellow HUMANIST, I've discovered that ListServ allows for centralized distribution of files. Files can be sent to, stored on, and fetched from a ListServ node relatively easily, so that a HUMANIST with information in high demand does not have to be bothered with sending it to each interested person directly. This service is available to us, and I suggest that we use it. So that we don't wear out our welcome with the good people of UTORONTO who sponsor our discussion group, I propose that we limit centralized storage to those files that are truly of general interest. Highly specialized material is better kept by the originator and sent out on request than maintained on an expensive storage medium in Toronto. So, if you have a candidate for centralized distribution, please send it to me; we can argue about its generality and then have it posted or not. In the language of a VM/CMS system, the following command will get you a list of the files maintained for HUMANIST: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME HUMANIST FILELIST And this command will cause a selected file to be sent to you: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET For translation of these commands into the language of your system, please consult with your local experts. I have discovered that in many cases wisdom is the cultivation of ignorance. Yours, W.M. From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: Filelist Date: Sat, 30 May 87 11:42:45 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 36 (36) TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME HUMANIST FILELIST From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 1 June 1987, 14:13:58 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 37 (37) Two recently promulgated errors: (1) I was given the wrong information about fetching a list of resident files from the UTORONTO node. I will let you know when the proper syntax has been determined, and I'll then be able to give you some idea of how much we can afford to store centrally. (2) A bad address for a colleague on MLNET has caused a rash of irrelevant chatter, for which I apologize. The problem is being investigated, but since other messages get through to him at the same address, it's difficult to know what's responsible. Yours, W.M. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASFrank Wm Tompa Subject: electronic publication Date: 1 June 1987, 14:35:53 EDTMon, 1 Jun 87 08:43:12 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 38 (38) Because HUMANIST is non-refereed, I would think that it falls in a completely different category than a refereed journal. I believe that an author could honestly claim that circulation in HUMANIST is similar to circulation of a technical report -- regardless of its quality, it is not perceived as a publication (wrt brownie points). On the other hand, such circulation does not in any way infringe on journal publication of the same document. I would claim that, in CS at least, there would be no conflict nor any perceived conflict. P.S. Were there to be a conflict, I as an author, would definitely choose a refereed journal if I thought the paper was of sufficient quality. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 2 June 1987, 21:45:04 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 39 (39) A contribution from Jeff Gillette, whom many of you must know, at least by reputation (as author of the Duke University Toolkit, that is): From: Jeffrey William Gillette Subject: Re: Electronic publishing Date: Sun, 31 May 87 20:48:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 40 (40) Regarding the subject of electronic vs. printed journal publishing, Perhaps I might throw my own 2 cents into the discussion. Let me start with two Would there be any advantage in contacting one or several professional journals who have editorial members involved in ACH, your Humanist project, or some subset of the two, inviting them to publish the "best of the Humanist discussion" - that is applicable to the appropriate discipline(s). It seems to me that the short question/answer/comment format of, e.g. Byte, would not be entirely appropriate. Perhaps, however, several "mini-columns" or longer discussions that take place each month would prove useful to the larger audience of the traditional journals. The first objection I see to this type of arrangement would be the problem of credit - does the university consider the regular computer column of Dan Brink or Bob Kraft in their particular discipline journals as valid a con- tribution to the academy as their more traditional contributions. Could some type of peer review of such columns be set up by which tenure commitees could be satisfied that this publication was indeed a valid contribution to the discipline? In the case of a school like Duke I have serious doubts. Perhaps other faculty are more enlightened. I know this suggestion is unpolished, but I guess it is as useful as any, given the ofttimes languid pace with which electronic media are being integrated into many of our disciplines. Peace, Jeff From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Wed, 3 Jun 87 16:18:25 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 41 (41) Heres my thoughts on the 'how to run Humanist' debate, which is of general interest beyond Humanist, I think (the debate, not my thoughts!). I think Willard's introductory note to new readers adequately defines what is and is not proper material for the list, so that leaves three problems: a) should the distribution be a weekly digest? at present, Toronto just forwards incoming material as soon as it arrives. This means that most days one gets a Humanist or two, each of which may add to a debate. This is all very fine in theory, but in practice I find it confusing as I get flustered by the size of my mailbox. I would much prefer it if all messages were collecte d for a week and then mailed on to us in a batch, so that, say, every Monday morning one got a huge mail full of peoples thoughts. As it is, I wonder who else is behaving like me - I waited for a few days, then printed out all the Humanist stuff and am now replying. b) mail vs. filestore. I would say that no contribution should normally exceed 150 lines, and that most should fit on a single screen or two. It simply is not possible to comfortably read the text on a VDU for most of us (I exclude the SUN owners, lucky dogs). I would go so far as to suggest that a Humanist editor (presumably Willard - sorry!) be asked to look at messages and put those over 150 lines into a file server system. c) "publication" - is this a real issue? anything as long as an article that is going to give any brownie points in ones institution isnt appropriate for electronic distribution in the present state of the technology, unless we start agreeing standards (Interleaf files? TeX? raw PostScript) its just not on to present a complex document on the screen across n continents. Ergo, only paper publication will do, so the Humanist version isnt the 'real' version, so editors should not be upset. . . However, as is common practice anyway, sending out drafts for comment is normal practice, so why not do it via Humanist? For myself, I intend to use Humanist for a) gossip cum question and answer b) sending out stuff that I would otherwise send xeroxes of c) giving synopses of work which is being fully published elsewhere. Flame off, as they say. lets get into the adverts - does anyone over in North America want to go and buy "Information Technology in the Humanities", ed. S. Rahtz, Halsted Press (John Wiley) 1987? It consists of 14 chapters by English academics about the problems of introducing computing into humanities curricula, both general issues (whether to learn programming, whether word-processing is academic etc) and discussions of particular subjects (the more unusual ones - Archaeology, Music, Classics etc - are present, while the much-written-about Computer Assisted Language Learning is not). Its about teaching ABOUT computing, not teaching WITH it. Does anyone else teach Prolog? Leslie Burkholder's ideas were welcome, and I would be curious to hear others. my students dont get any further than a dating agency - I wish I could get them as far as foxes, geese and grain! sebastian rahtz From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: Weekly updates? Date: Wed, 3 Jun 87 16:58:46 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 42 (42) This is to comment on Sebastian Rahtz's suggestion to make HUMANIST produce a weekly digest instead of a daily stream of new mail. I agree that daily influxes of new mail can be distracting, but I think we are better off with the system as it stands. I won't dwell on the obvious point that a weekly digest would involve a fairly substantial change to LISTSERV (which runs a continuously active 'server machine' to accept mail sent to a list, and forward it to the active members of that list automatically; most LISTSERV machines also handle subscriptions and cancellations without human intervention). Nor shall I belabor the point that a weekly digest requires preparation and editing -- thankless work for which it really seems unfair for us to volunteer Willard. ListServ makes it relatively easy to run a conference, but only because the host must seldom intervene. If the conference host must edit the mail and produce a digest manually, who will ever volunteer to be a host? The mild inefficiency of sending multiple copies of the mail across the Atlantic is readily corrected if someone on that side has a VM/CMS machine and the new "distributed LISTSERV" -- assuming UToronto has the distributed version too. But is it worth the effort? A digest, however well constructed, is never a substitute for the actual conversation, and not often a perfect guide to it: our individual interests varying so much, a single digest might find it hard to serve everyone's purposes. Also, while I can usually find five minutes to read one day's Humanist mail, I won't often find twenty minutes for a week's worth. And I at least find the development of discussion over real time more interesting. For context, I do save the mail up and print it off periodically for review; as S.R. points out, that's not hard to do. Michael Sperberg-McQueen From: LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK Subject: Date: 4-JUN-1987 16:33:32 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 43 (43) Concerning LISTSERVER and multiple copies flying (more like waddling) across the Atlantic... Which JANET IBM CMS site would like to volunteer to be a distributed LISTSERV node? It should be one fairly near water [for walking on], with a local committment to supporting arts computing in general and networking in particular and of course a really uptodate mail server. Come to think of it Sebastian ...... Meanwhile, I would still like to know where I should send the Text Archive snapshot so that people can get it direct. And also how to get whatever's there myself. I agree with Michael SPMcQ that the only point of having Humanist is as a continuous flow of information (or whatever it is). Unfortunately, the JANET/EARN/BITNET connexion is still plagued by machine failures, inconsistent address tables, lost messages, inadequate messaging protocols etc. So instead of a flow we tend to get nothing at all for a few days and then 29 in a row, just like buses. This may also have something to do with the astonishment with which I have been reading the discussion about whether or not electronic publication "counts" in some sense. In my book, this medium has a very long way to go indeed before it could reasonably be called publication. For a start, it's not accessible to everyone. Lou From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 4 June 1987, 23:40:39 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 44 (44) It seems obvious that electronic publication, like other activities related to computing, seldom if ever counts professionally in the humanities. For this reason, I'm told, much good courseware doesn't get designed by those who are best qualified to design it, and even articles and reviews printed in reputable journals rarely mean very much on a c.v. In part, as a friend just pointed out to me, this is justified; the integrity of the discipline is at stake. I wonder, however, how some of the finer work in computing can be rigidly distinguished with respect to worth from compilation of bibliographies or editing of texts, for example? In any event, those of us who find ourselves supporers of computing in the humanities can do something about defining our work academically and raising its standards. We can also, together, lobby for its recognition, and thus the SIG of which this discussion group is a product. Take electronic publishing. Following the analogy nearest at hand, we could form an electronic journal, with an editor, an editorial board, and all the rest. What would the relationship be between this journal and the printed variety? How would the medium influence the message? In length of articles? In style? Alas, it would in language, but English is the current lingua franca. It seems to me that the sine qua non of worthwhile electronic publication is quality of language and thought as well as accuracy of information. This means good editing and demanding review. It could be done (I think should be done), though at some risk to the first few contributors. Any takers -- or givers? Having completed two substantial academic papers for which neither the research notes nor the written words touched paper until the very end, I have some confidence that electronic publication in our sense need be neither trivial nor slapdash. My faith in this is that if we do a first-class job in our common profession, it will begin to be properly recognized. To be practical: we could form a separate ListServ for this journal; contributions to it would be mailed to the editor; he or she would mail these to the editorial board for consideration, or to readers; rejection, revision, publication would ensue; the readership would consist of the members of the discussion group. Some subjects come immediately to mind: computing activities at university X; reviews of software and hardware; proposals for design and implementation of software; computational methodologies; administrative structures for support of computing in the humanities; and so forth. In some cases, articles could be "reprinted" from newsletters or small journals, whose circulation is unfortunately restricted; in other cases articles might anticipate publications in print. No doubt there are many problems with such a proposal. If they seem worthy, please point them out. From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Fri, 5 Jun 87 14:06:31 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 45 (45) a) OK, so other people prefer their meat daily. I ride a bike, so I am not used to Lou Burnard's buses, but I dont actually find that the HUMANIST messages are backing up like that. My site gets them via a UUCP link to a proper JANET site, so maybe that reshuffles them. Anyway, daily or weekly meat is relatively trivial - what about size of contributions? b) Willard's note about an electronic journal is attractive, but I do not see it working for the simple reason that the technology isnt up to it (nor looks like being). All the paraphernalia of a typeset book isnt there just as a nicety, it all serves a purpose, and the e-mail environment that most of us live in (I think I am well off in a Unix world, if I had to read Humanist on this IBM I use for sending, I would give up!) does not have the facilities to convey thoughts as we are used to do on paper. That said, there is no reason why a conventional journal should not operate as Willard suggests (I presume some do) - why not do all that he suggests but just print it at the end (which is all most of us would do anyway!). Now if you suggest distributing papers in TeX format for us to print locally... but there would be howls of protest about that. Does one NEED a new journal? all the problems (who are the editors? how does it get credibility? build up a circulation? etc etc) would be there for the E-Journal as for the paper one (save ONLY for printing costs, and you would simply be asking people to pay for that on the fly instead of as a subscription ). I think Willard's most interesting point is when he suggests that computer work be given as much credence as, say, editing a text. That I must agree with - but I dont think an E-Journal would help. What do punters think of the floppy disc SCOPE? in many ways, thats an attractive option, as the PC environment is much more civilised than the e-mail one. What about all Willard's ideas going toward something like that? Sebastian Rahtz P.S. sorry, Lou, I dont think we have LISTSERV here. Computers are for FORTRAN in Southampton! but I am pursuing the matter. From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UK Subject: Electronic Publishing Date: 05 Jun 87 17:10:18 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 46 (46) Picking up only one of Sebastian Rahtz's points, I think its true to say that (though there are other reasons), 'humanists' here at Edinburgh are reluctant to do a lot of work on the computer (any computer!) because such work is not visible to the people who assess (dangerous term at the moment!) their work. An electronic journal would be similarly invisible to such people, and therefore not much better from that point of view than any other work on the computer. It's interesting to realise that this may well be a general problem. This is a subjective opinion, formed as a result of casual conversations with various people around here, but I think that this situation might be changing (locally!) - the sooner the better I feel. Roger Hare. PS. What's a bus? From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASDan Brink Subject: credit Date: 5 June 1987, 15:33:00 EDTThu, 04 Jun 87 19:12:36 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 47 (47) In a HUMANIST note dated May 31, Jeff Gillette addresses the issue of academic "credit" for computer activity: Do tenure and promotion committees value programming, software reviewing, and other of the activities so typical of HUMANIST addressees? (A recent issue of the Chronicle covered this matter in some detail; I would recommend it to anyone interested in such matters.) The Chronicle of Higher Education (3/18/87: XXXIII, #27, p. 1: "Software for teaching given little credit in Tenure Reviews" I do think that computing activity is little valued by colleagues (unless their printers won't work). In my department, for example, writing software ranked dead last in a list of 35 activities considered worthy for English faculty. And, in fact, I have dropped the MLJ column because the activity is so little valued. Further, we all know of cases in which well known and respected humanists have been forced out of the profession. At the same time, I was not hired to work with computers. (The micro didn't exist when I was hired!) So, it is to some degree my own doing. And I have not really used the computer as a tool in my own research; I have worked on the improvement of the tool itself. A number of people, like Jones, Oakman, Smith, Abercrombie, etc. have dealt with the problem by moving to computer science departments or by receiving an administrative assignment officially condoning their humanities computing activities. That, I think, is the key. Those entering the field now would be well advised to be sure that their computer activity officially be made part of their job description. Computer familiarity will probably be a real plus for humanists entering the job market in the next few years; they should be sure that they will be given full credit for their activity down the road. But programming, running computer centers, etc., is not, and probably should not be, valued as research. Enough of this; back to FLEXTEX . . . From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: Phonetics/Publications Date: Sat, 06 Jun 87 13:55:30 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 48 (48) This week I have been absent from Exeter for three days - on my return I found a dozen communications from the Remote Grey Book. The subject under discussion is obviously an interesting one but I found wading through my electronic mail and following the discussion on the print out a very tiresome process. I do not think that I should welcome a plethora of articles in this form. Abstracts, bibliographies, yes. The danger of ready availibility is ready forgetability or ignorability. As for assessing 'status' of electronic articles, we obviously have to ask the inevitable question of why an article is written. If its aim is uniquely to gain promotion, then electronic diffusion wi have very little status, or one comparable to that of home-produced material at present. A student here has produced an elementary program for automatic correction of French phonetic transciption. Who else is working in this field? Who has perfected the process? Who would be prepared to cooperate? Keith Cameron From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 7 June 1987, 16:59:11 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 49 (49) Although it is barely more than a week old, our talk about electronic publication has already taken on an interesting shape. The following is an elaborated summary. It is not intended to conclude our discussion but to alert you to it directions. The discussion began with the possibility that HUMANIST could be used to distribute files centrally and with the recognition that printed journals do certain things rather poorly. A proposal for an electronic journal, however, provoked significant criticism on two grounds: (1) that it would give its contributors little or no professional recognition, and (2) that the electronic medium is at present incapable of representing typographic effects (such as italics) and the characters of many languages other than English. It seems highly unlikely that as humanists we can correct the almost universal disregard for work in computing among the committees that govern hiring, tenure, and promotion. There seem to be two reasons for this disregard. The major one is that academic "job descriptions" seldom if ever recognize this kind of work. One of us suggested that when individuals are hired for academic jobs they should attempt to get computing activities explicitly mentioned among their duties. First, however, we need to understand the appropriate analogies. What sorts of work are we talking about? Is some of it equivalent to committee work? to compilation of bibliographies and other duties of running a journal? to editing of texts? What kind of involvement with computing in the humanities (if any) should be recognized as genuine research? We could ask, for example, what a specialist in literary criticism or theory does that in principle is more research-like than the designer of software for sophisticated textual analysis. The second reason for the disregard from our academic masters and colleagues may be the often poor quality of the writing (and sometimes thinking) associated with computing. The informality of the medium may have quite a bit to do with this. Mainframe editors are in general so primitive and screen images so difficult to proofread that we are tempted to slap something down and dash it off without much thought. We can do something about this, it has been suggested, by peer-review and editorial intervention. Nevertheless, informality in an electronic discussion allows for the communal development of ideas. Some of us have suggested that in cooperation with one or more established journals we distill from our discussions items to be printed in those journals, on the analogy of Bix in Byte magazine, though not in the same format. (The president of the ACH has mentioned the possibility of such publication in the quarterly newsletter of that organization.) It has also been pointed out that in computer science, articles can be circulated as "technical reports" without any perceived conflict with later publication in refereed journals -- and without the "brownie points." Our discussion seems to have converged on an understanding of what the electronic medium is and is not suitable for. Thus to attempt a close analogue of the refereed journal would be a mistake; at the same time, there is a need for a means of publication that takes advantage of the informality and rapidity of electronic mail. To allow for this almost conversational informality, editorial intervention needs to be kept at a minimum. Editing is required in the transition into print, however. Perhaps, as an affiliated activity of the ACH and ALLC, we should ask for the help of these two organizations in publishing summaries of our discussions here and various newsworthy items. I would also like to suggest that we talk with the editors of such journals as CHum about circulating versions of articles to be published there. Reviews of software are particularly crucial. Please let us all know what you think. (The length of this note is 73 lines & about 4000 characters long.) From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: Electronic Publication Date: Mon, 08 Jun 87 10:57:39 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 50 (50) As intimated in last communication about HUMANIST publication, in favour of SHORT notices, abstracts, reviews. bibliographies, publicity, etc. New methods demand new styles and it should be possible to develop a new style of writing for electronic publication - universal system of truncation, abbreviation, notation which would be interpreted and formatted by universally distributed local programs etc. KCC. From: GW2%UK.AC.YORK.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: MILTON PROJECT PROPOSAL Date: 11-JUN-1987 10:37:30 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 51 (51) First thoughts prompted by reading the discussion about electronic publishing: The new medium makes possible new forms of intellectual work, forms of collective research and collaborative writing that have not yet been defined, professionally or institutionally. In a spirit or experiment, i want to propose a collaboration, to any and all who are interested. The focus will be John Milton. The substantial example & inspiration might be Christopher Hill's MILTON AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION, together with Stephen Greenblatt's RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING. They suggest a form of cultural history which could be refined and extended by collaboration. Anybody there?? From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 11 June 1987, 22:07:54 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 52 (52) A fellow HUMANIST here mentioned to me over dinner (very good it was, too) his frustration with notes that don't contain the name of the sender. On some systems one can easily guess at least the first or last name, but if your userid is "43256_XRRG," for example, it's not so easy. A human name gives the imagination something to work with. On a VM/CMS system a user gets his or her full name included by putting it in the NAMES file and then opting for the "long" option when sending a note. I don't know what one does on other systems. Alternatively, you can just sign your name to the bottom of your notes to HUMANIST. So, I propose that henceforth we submit only signed notes. If for some reason you want to send an anonymous message, send it to me and I'll pass it on to HUMANIST without your name or userid attached. Thanks for your patience. From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: CALL CONF/EXETER Date: Fri, 12 Jun 87 09:47:59 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 53 (53) For all HUMANIST readers - accommodation still available if required. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PROGRAM STRUCTURE and PRINCIPLES in CALL Lopes Hall, September 21 -23 1987. COST 50 pounds all inclusive - pro rata rates available (Draft programme) MONDAY September 21 16.30 - 18.00 Registration 18.00 Reception 19.00 Dinner 20.15 S.Dodd (Exeter) CALL and the chalkface. D.F.Clarke, (U.E.A.) Design considerations in the production of extended computer assisted reading materials TUESDAY September 22 08.00 Breakfast 09.30 P.Hickman, (La Ste Union) Structuring interactive grammar practice programs. D.Ferney, (Wolverhampton Poly.) A computer model of the French native speaker's skill with grammatical gender. 10.45 Coffee 11.15 O.Durrani, (Durham) Designer Labyrinths: Text mazes for language learners. A.Benwell, (Lanchester Poly.) How we use HELP facilities. 13.00 Lunch 14.30 A.Kukulska-Hulme, (Aston) Liberation or constraint : the useful- ness of a program interface to a vocabulary database. G.A.Inkster, (Lancaster) Databases as a learning activity. 15.45 Tea 16.15 Workshop : Reading Programs - D.F.Clarke (U.E.A.); I.Morris (Man chester Poly.). Language Programs - D.Ashead (B'ham); O.Durrani (Durham). 18.30 Wine reception 19.00 Dinner 20.15 J.D.Fox, (U.E.A.) Can CAL aid vocabulary acquisition? L.M.Wright, (UC, Bangor) Aspects of text storage and text compression in CALL. WEDNESDAY September 23 08.00 Breakfast 09.30 D.Scarborough (City London Poly.) The computer as a teaching resource on a Commercial French course. J.E.Galletly (Buckingham) Elementary verbal phrase syntax- checker for French sentences. 10.45 Coffee 11.15 Workshop: Language programs : M.Blondel (City London Poly.); B.Farrington (Aberdeen); P.Hickman (La Ste Union); D.Ferney (B'ham); M.L'Huillier (Brunel). 13.00 Lunch 14.15 B.Farrington, (Aberdeen) A.I. Grandeur et servitude M.Yazdani, (Exeter) Tools for second language teaching. Future projects. 15.45 Tea KCC/EXETER From: GW2%UK.AC.YORK.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: MORE ABOUT PROPOSED MILTON PROJECT close Date: 12-JUN-1987 14:55:09 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 54 (54) MILTON PROJECT : SECOND PROPOSAL -------------------------------- A From: GW2%UK.AC.YORK.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: MILTON PROJECT: A SECOND PROPOSAL Date: 12-JUN-1987 16:49:44 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 55 (55) I want to offer some more details about the proposed collaborative project on Milton. Don't let the initial reference to Hill & Greenblatt put you off ...my interest in Milton begins from an encounter with that body of work, but is not circumscribed by it. I would like to invite collaboration on a close linguistic study of the early poetry, exploring Milton's affinities with Spenser and Shakespeare, within the historical framework of the development of Early Modern English. Obviously this kind of inquiry lends itself, in its initial phase at least, to the use of a computer to compile the data. Once the OED is available on-line it will be possible to ask complex questions about the history of the language with a new precision. I'm not sure how to formulate the question of 'affinity' in a fashion appropriate to a package like the Oxford Concordance Program. The question that 'really' interests me comes after this preliminary work. I want to test my merely speculative sense that Milton stands (ever-belated) at the close of a period of intense linguistic innovation; that his freedom (at the level of word-formation and syntactical experiment) is significantly diminis inhibition, anxiety and self-censorship are the shaping ideological conditions of Milton's writing. This would lead into an investigation of the paternal metaphor in Milton, the successive inscriptions of the father in his texts. (The scrivener-musician fascinates me...) One escape from this intimate tyranny seems to have been the theory and practice promising a vision of a redeemed sexuality. These are, for me, the issues that reading Milton suggests most insistently. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who finds them interesting enough to merit some systematic collective investigation. Geoff Wall From: GW2%UK.AC.YORK.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: TO USERS OF NOTA BENE Date: 15-JUN-1987 11:43:09 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 56 (56) I'd be very interested to hear from anyone with experience of using the NOTA BENE WP program, to help me decide whether to acquire it for our deptartment's IBM PC. Thanks Geoff Wall York From: JMBHC@CUNYVM Subject: TO USERS OF NOTA BENE Date: Mon, 15 Jun 87 20:05 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 57 (57) Hi. We have/use nota bene with our faculty. They love it. I've just gotten my own copy (haven't even opened it yet), but I'm sure that I'll make it an often used package. I plan to use it for manuscripts, mainly. At any rate, I'll ask Bob Tannenbaum to reply to you since he know more about it. Joanne Badagliacco, Hunter College From: "Bill Winder (416) 960-9793" Subject: Date: 15 June 1987, 21:07:32 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 58 (58) I was interested to see that prolog is offered as a humanist programming language. I have used Turbo Prolog for about a year and I'm now considering proposing it for applications in the context of a French lexicography course. Before doing so I would like to have an opinion on a few questions from the forerunners in this area (L. Burkholder et S. Ratz seem to have had such experience -- hopefully there are others). The first question, which has plagued me since I adopted Turbo Prolog as a programming environment, is whether it is sufficiently powerful for large scale (micro) applications. Would not other prologs be better, such as Logicware's, or Marseilles's Prolog II? There have been several criticisms levelled at Turbo Prolog, most of which seem trivial (such as the fact that it is not interpreted, but rather compiled prolog). The criticism that it is a typed prolog might be important -- I have already run into situations where domain typing has forced me to multiply predicates for each argument type. A case in point: to do a sort on a large file (over 64 K) some rather tricky programming techniques are required. The innovation of prolog as a programming language is that it "de- algorithmatises" programming, at least to some degree. But in Turbo Prolog, where large applications require baroque, stack- and heap-sparing procedures, the otherwise logical development of a prolog programme is lost. In short, could anyone suggest reasons for preferring another prolog to Turbo Prolog, or for preferring another language (such as Snobol or Icon)? Does anyone use Turbo Prolog at all? All remarks in this vein would be appreciated. Bill Winder (Winder @ UTOREPAS) From: "Stephen R. Reimer (416) 585-4576" Subject: Date: 16 June 1987, 00:36:52 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 59 (59) Our esteemed sysop, Willard McCarty, has been a regular user of Nota Bene since sometime shortly before or after the birth of Steve Siebert; indeed, I am sure that Willard has published a review of NB somewhere, but I've forgotten the reference. Perhaps he could be persuaded to say a few words? or, at least, to remind us of where his review appeared? From: SUSAN%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX2@AC.UK Subject: Date: 16-JUN-1987 09:00:06 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 60 (60) For reviews of Nota Bene, see (1) Willard McCarty, Computers and the Humanities 20 (1986), 62-71. (2) D.H.A Kaferly, Literary and Linguistic Computing 2 (1987), 37-39. Susan Hockey From: LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK Subject: Date: 16-JUN-1987 10:26:52 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 61 (61) Re Geoff Wall's request for comments on ways of mechanising the search for affinities (if that is what he meant), I thought of quite a neat way of doing this in SQL in the shower this morning. If you have a table A containing columns WD and REF where WD is any feature of potential interest and REF is where it occurs in text A; and likewise a table B with cols WD and REF for text B, then the SQL statement select A.REF AREF, B.REF BREF, COUNT(*) ECHOES from A,B where A.WD = B.WD group by A.REF,B.REF having count(*) > 5 order by echoes desc will produce a list of the places in A and B where the same features are to be found in descending order of the number of such features shared at each place. The 'having' bit rules out places where there are fewer than 5 shared features - obviously this can be tweaked. I've left it deliberately vague what 'features' and 'places' mean - but if you thought of them as 'interesting word stems' and 'sentence' I wouldnt quarrel with you. I haven't tried it, but it ought to work! Joe Raben's work on Miltonic echoes in Shelley (written long before the invention of SQL) is what put the idea into my head. That, and dropping the soap. Lou Burnard From: Willard McCarty Subject: Who Speaks to Whom, and Who Cares Date: 16 June 1987, 08:13:39 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 62 (62) Some time ago, prompted by complaints about too much from HUMANIST, I suggested that replies to questions, such as the most recent one about Nota Bene, should go directly to the questioner, and that the questioner might then gather up the interesting replies after some interval and publish them on HUMANIST. Could we come to an agreement about whether we adopt this scheme or not? Please send your preference to me directly (MCCARTY at UTOREPAS.BITNET), and when I get a sufficient number of replies, I'll publish them here. Any other scheme to regulate the flow of conversation is also welcome. Yours, W.M. From: Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 Subject: Date: 16 June 1987, 07:53:14 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 63 (63) I wonder if anyone else in the T.O. area saw the article/opinion piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail over the weekend bemoaning the degenerative effect which desktop publishing was already having on book publishing, standards of typography and editing, quality of finished book, etc. It did not go quite as far as saying that DTP is responsible for the Decline of Western Civilisation As We Know It, but the author did definitely foresee the end of The Book in the near future. Now obviously this is to say the least grossly exaggerated. I've been hearing these mournful plaints about the decline of typography and editing ever since paperback novels cost 50 cents..... But it is clear that the phenomena observed are real -- that is, standards of typography and editing have declined, the quality of many printed books is very poor (I don't mean the quality of their content, but their "production values"!), etc -- however faulty the reasoning which lays this all at the foot of DTP may be. My perspective on this is as someone very much involved in a scholarly publishing operation. REED, where I've worked one way or another since 1976, sees its volumes of edited texts straight through from transcription of MSS to camera-ready final proof in-house. One of the reasons is, of course, the need to maintain control over the scholarly quality of the edition and its apparatus, but another chief reason is a deep concern over the quality of the final book from the point of view of design and production. Happily, this concern is shared by our publisher, the University of Toronto Press, and its design department. But it seems to me that DTP is far from a force working against quality in production and design: until reading this article it wouldn't have occurred to me that someone could cast recent improve- ments in computer-based typesetting and pseudo-typesetting as the villain of the piece. In fact, I'd always thought that the great advantage of DTP for the scholarly community is that it places the ability to maintain that kind of control over both aspects of the final book, which we have been able to enjoy at REED because we are a large project with a major university press behind us, within the grasp of most academics working on a university campus. I think that more and more university computer centres and departments are likely to make available the equipment and expertise needed to allow individual editors of journals or authors able to control and produce their own work up at least the first proof stage, if they wish. Surely the DTP can be used to reverse a trend toward poor quality in book production, rather than increase it, at least among those groups to whom high-quality book production would be important. I don't really think very much of electronic publication for a lot of reasons, and especially one which Lou mentioned, and no-one else really seems to have picked up in subsequent discussion, that is, that it is accessible to such a small audience of users/readers. But using electronic means to improve the quality of conventional scholarly publishing really seems to me an exciting possibility. As the quality output devices like laser printers improve, it seems likely that DTP may make scholarly books less expensive to produce. What do people think? Is anyone else interested? Abigail Ann Young YOUNG at UTOREPAS From: John Bradley Subject: DTP Discussion Date: Tue, 16 Jun 87 11:33:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 64 (64) Abigail Young's comments on DTP, and the effect on the quality of today's publications strikes a responsive chord in me -- DTP is an area I have been looking at quite closely for some time. I think a certain amount of the negative comment in the Toronto Globe and Mail article can be easily explained: the natural human trait to emphasize the negative side of change. Of course, DTP is, unfortunately, often used in such a way that it degrades quality, and, indeed, such an article can be useful in that it points these problems out. However, I think it is foolish to ONLY look at the negative side. It seems to me that there are two reasons why DTP might reduce the quality of output: (1) The technology cannot do as good a job as traditional methods. (2) The control over the technology is put in the hands of people without the required skills. Item (1) is, I think, gradually fading as an issue. For example, it's true that Laser printer output is not as good quality as a true typesetter, however, PostScript typesetters such as the Linotronic 100 or 300 also make it possible to use DTP software and equipment to produce typeset quality images. Another Point 2 is, I think, really the central issue, and is likely to remain so. Really good work in this area cannot be done by amateurs. In the interest of reducing costs, "camera ready" copy is being produced by people without the ability to judge the quality of what they are producing. Almost every day I see people who have no understanding of what they can reasonably expect from software and hardware: for example, I still talk to at least 1 person a week who is planning to produce camera ready copy for a book by connecting a laser printer or our typesetter to WordPerfect. Each time I explain that WordPerfect CAN drive our PostScript typesetter or laser printer -- but does far too inadequate a job in many ways (for example, of hyphenation and justification) to meet the standards that one would expect for a scholarly work. Clearly, the decision to use WordPerfect for this purpose was made by a person who is ill equipped to decide! I guess the issue is one of education. I believe that high quality work can come out of DTP, and that DTP permits new publishing ventures to be considered and tried. However, the quality issue needs to be better understood in the community. At U of T I am currently attempting to put together a brief seminar to introduce some of these issues to the university community. Perhaps this type of thing is needed at other places. I'd certainly appreciate comments from anyone who might be interested. Please contact me directly at the following address. I'd be glad to produce a summary of comments, and circulate via HUMANIST. .... John Bradley BRADLEY at UTORONTO From: Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 Subject: Date: 16 June 1987, 11:32:35 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 65 (65) Is anyone on this list working with English renaissance poetry, eg Spenser? I need to consult such a person about a possible classical/humanistic (in its more traditional historical meaning) literary allusion, but don't want to take up everyone's time. Thank you! Abigail Ann Young Records of Early English Drama University of Toronto YOUNG at UTOREPAS From: Willard McCarty Subject: Autobiographies Date: 17 June 1987, 22:53:28 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 66 (66) As most of you will know, I have asked anyone interested in becoming a member of HUMANIST to send me a brief description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. Little did I suspect when I first asked for these descriptions that I would get so many interesting autobiographical statements. As these have accumulated, I have become more and more convinced that they should be shared with everyone so that we can all get to know each other and see what it is that we do as a professional group. What I propose, then, is to edit what I have into a convenient form and distribute it to all HUMANISTs. Some of you may wish to send me a revised version of what you sent previously (given that you could not have guessed what might be done with those words eventually), and some may not. So, at the risk of angering those who may be away from their e-mail for the next two weeks, let's say that I will wait until July 1 (Canada Day) before I act on this idea to allow anyone who wants to revise his or her life-story to send the improved version to me. Please do not ask me to send you your contribution so that you can decide whether or not to revise it. If in doubt, write out a new one. Be as brief as you can, but try to cover all of what you do and wish to do in this area; specify your institional status; your academic or non-academic background; and anything else you think would be of interest to the rest. You may recall a plan to circulate a detailed questionnaire that would ask for some of this information and other things in a much more detailed form. That questionnaire is still in the works. Meanwhile, as an interim and exploratory measure, the brief autobiographies will help us understand what needs to be asked. Thanks for your cooperation. I think you'll agree that the result will be more than worth the effort. Yours, W.M. From: ZACOUR@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 18 June 1987, 15:35:18 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 67 (67) At Willard McCarty's suggestion, a brief baring... Norman Zacour Professor of Medieval History at the University of Toronto (just retired); interested especially in the history of the papacy of Avignon; just finished writing about the treatment of Jews and Muslims in 14th century l egal works; now working on the history of the college of cardinals in the Middl e Ages; has written a short manual on WordPerfect to get students of the Centre for Medieval Studies up and running on the IBM; and some quick programming for a blind friend who is a writer and a professor of English, to simplify his Life with DOS and Company, word processing in general, and keeping data about his students in particular. Interested in hearing about any software that will handle multiple variants of medieval mss., to produce notes giving the lemma, the line number, the variant(s) and their witnesses, etc. From: "Grace Logan (Arts Computing Office)" Subject: Date: Thu, 18 Jun 87 12:48:46 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 68 (68) Does anyone out there have a good, concise, clear introduction to Artificial Intelligence and/or Expert Systems? Articles,short books, references of any kind would be much appreciated. I would like to include something about these matters in a brief introduction for first year students and I find my own knowledge rather patchy, dis- jointed and impressionistic. I'd be grateful for even a reasonable definition. cheers,, Grace Logan, Arts Computing, U.of Waterloo Waterloo, Ont. From: IDE@VASSAR Subject: nota bene Date: Fri, 19-JUN-1987 13:35 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 69 (69) I am just now reading the comments concerning nota bene and wonder if anyone is aware of the lengthy and very good review of it in the first issue of Bits & Bytes Newsletter? From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UKR.J.HARE Subject: LISTSERVFILELISTLISTSERVFILELIST Date: 19 Jun 87 11:54:48 bst05 Jun 87 14:04:10 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 70 (70) --- Forwarded message: SENDME LISTSERV FILELIST --- End of forwarded message From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UKR.J.HARE Subject: Electronic PublishingElectronic Publishing Date: 19 Jun 87 11:55:52 bst05 Jun 87 17:10:18 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 71 (71) --- Forwarded message: Picking up only one of Sebastian Rahtz's points, I think its true to say that (though there are other reasons), 'humanists' here at Edinburgh are reluctant to do a lot of work on the computer (any computer!) because such work is not visible to the people who assess (dangerous term at the moment!) their work. An electronic journal would be similarly invisible to such people, and therefore not much better from that point of view than any other work on the computer. It's interesting to realise that this may well be a general problem. This is a subjective opinion, formed as a result of casual conversations with various people around here, but I think that this situation might be changing (locally!) - the sooner the better I feel. Roger Hare. PS. What's a bus? --- End of forwarded message From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UKMCCARTY%UTOREPAS@UK.AC.RL.EARN Subject: Forwarded message Date: 19 Jun 87 11:53:42 bst4 June 1987, 07:18:59 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 72 (72) --- Forwarded message: From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 73 (73) Welcome to HUMANIST From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 74 (74) HUMANIST is a Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN electronic discussion group for people who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review software, answer questions, give advice, program, write documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this area are included. Although HUMANIST is intended to help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is primarily meant for discussion rather than publication or advertisement. In general, members of the network are encouraged to ask questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards. Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly different from the support of other kinds of computing, with which it may be confused. Perhaps you don't think so. In any case, let us know what you do think, about this or any other relevant subject. HUMANIST is one of the inaugural projects of a new special interest group for the support of computing in the humanities, which is currently applying for joint affiliation with the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Information about this SIG may be obtained by sending a message to George Brett (ECSGHB@TUCC.BITNET). New members are welcome, provided that they fit the broad guidelines described above. Please tell anyone who might be interested to send a note to me, giving his or her name, address, telephone number, university affiliation, and a short description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. I will then add that person to the list. If anyone should wish to be dropped from the list, please send a note to that effect. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 75 (75) How to Use HUMANIST From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 76 (76) Sending messages ----------------------------------------------------------------- Currently anyone given access to HUMANIST can communicate with all other members without restriction. A member need not be on Bitnet but can use any comparable network with access to Bitnet. Thus, to send mail to everyone simultaneously, use whatever command your system provides (e.g., NOTE or MAIL) addressed to HUMANIST at UTORONTO. Your message is then sent by your local software to the UTORONTO node of Bitnet, where the "Revised List Processor" (or ListServ) automatically redirects it to everyone currently on the list of members. [Please note that in the following description, commands will be given in the form acceptable on a VM/CMS system. If your system is different, you will have to make the appropriate translation.] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Conventions and Etiquette ----------------------------------------------------------------- Restricted conversations or asides can, of course, develop from the unrestricted discussions on HUMANIST by members communicating directly with each other. This is particularly recommended for replies to general queries, so that HUMANIST and its members are not burdened with messages of interest only to the person who asked the question and, perhaps, a few others. If, for example, one of us asks the rest about the availability of software for keeping notes in Devanagari, suggestions should be sent directly to the questioner's e-mail address, not to HUMANIST. A questioner who receives one or more generally interesting and useful replies might consider gathering them together with the original question and submitting the collection to HUMANIST. Please use your judgment about what the whole group should receive. We could easily overwhelm each other and so defeat the purpose of HUMANIST. Strong methods are available for controlling a discussion group, but self-control seems preferable. This is not to discourage controversy -- quite the contrary -- but only what could become tiresome junk-mail. Please make it an invariable practice to help the recipients of your messages scan them by including a SUBJECT line in your note. Be aware, however, that some people will read no more than the SUBJECT line, so you should take care that it is accurate and comprehensive as well as brief. Use your judgment about the length of your notes as well. If you find yourself writing an essay or have a substantial amount of information to offer, it might be better to follow on of the two methods outlined in the next section. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Distributing files ----------------------------------------------------------------- HUMANIST offers us an excellent means of distributing written material of many kinds, e.g., reviews of software or hardware. Although conventional journals remain the means of professional recognition, they are often too slow to keep up with changes in computing. With some care, HUMANIST could provide a supplementary venue of immediate benefit to our colleagues. There are two methods of distributing such material. The more specialized reports should probably be reduced to abstracts and posted in this form to HUMANISTs at large, then sent by the originators directly to those who request them. Reports of general interest, however, can be kept centrally, on the UTORONTO node, and fetched by individuals when required. To find out what is available centrally, send the following command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME LISTSERV FILELIST If you see something you want, then use the following to fetch it: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET If you have something that you think worth posting, please send it to me, and we can then discuss its fate. Storage space on the UTORONTO node is not infinite nor ultimately free, so we need to be careful about how much we put there. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ListServ's Commands and Facilities ----------------------------------------------------------------- New members will be interested to know that one of the files centrally maintained by ListServ at UTORONTO is an archive of messages for the past month. If you have just joined and want to know the recent history of discussions, enter the following command (or its equivalent on non-VM/CMS systems): TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET HUMANIST LOG8705 ListServ will then send you the contents of the monthly archive. ListServ accepts several other commands, for example to retrieve a list of the current members or to set various options. These are described in a document named LISTSERV MEMO. This and other documentation will normally be available to you from your nearest ListServ node and is best fetched from there, since in that way the network is least burdened. You should consult with your local experts to discover the nearest ListServ; they will also be able to help you with whatever problems in the use of ListServ you may encounter. Once you have found the nearest node, type the following: TELL LISTSERV AT XXXXXX INFO ? The various documents available to you will then be listed. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Suggestions and Complaints ----------------------------------------------------------------- Suggestions about the running of HUMANIST or its possible relation to other means of communication are very welcome. So are complaints, particularly if they are constructive. Experience has shown that an electronic discussion group can be either beneficial or burdensome to its members. Much depends on what the group as a whole wants and does not want. Please make your views known, to everyone or to me directly, as appropriate. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Willard McCarty 31 May 1987 Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) --- End of forwarded message From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UK Subject: Accidental messages. Date: 19 Jun 87 12:02:52 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 77 (77) You probably just got a series of your own messages blown back at you. These sho be deleted, not sent to the HUMANIST bulletin Board. This happened accidentally while we were setting up our own local bulletin board. Sorry about that - hope it don't cause too many problems! Roger Hare. From: CAMERON%UK.AC.EXETER@AC.UK Subject: LISTSERV Date: Sat, 20 Jun 87 11:38:51 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 78 (78) TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME LISTSERV FILELIST From: Willard McCarty Subject: An accident and a misunderstanding Date: 20 June 1987, 17:46:27 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 79 (79) Recently an accident of some sort in Edinburgh resulted in a very large number of old HUMANIST notes being sent to everyone on the list. This certainly demonstrates that the power of electronic mail, like a loosely held firehose, can turn against the user! Please be aware that anything sent to HUMANIST at UTORONTO is immediately and automatically propagated to everyone; no one here decides whether a note should be passed on or not. Once something starts to go wrong we here may be able to stop it, but only if we notice it in time. So be careful, please. We are still working on a facility for centralized storage of files here but have not yet figured out how to provide it. Until then it is useless to ask for LISTSERV FILELIST, since nothing is there except for the monthly log of past messages. In any event, once something is put there, you should fetch this FILELIST by sending the appropriate command directly to LISTSERV at UTORONTO and not -- please note -- by sending the command inside a note to HUMANIST at UTORONTO, as some of you have been doing. Thanks for your continued patience with this adolescent service. Yours, W.M. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 21 June 1987, 23:58:31 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 80 (80) The following is a slightly edited collection of all the responses I received to my question about how conversations on HUMANIST should be regulated. As you will see, the preference seems to be for freely ranging discussions with a good measure of self-control. This is just what I'd hoped for -- the best form of government for free people, if I may say so. Please note the point about using a "reply" in response number 7. From: UDAA270%UK.AC.KCL.CC.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: Date: 16-JUN-1987 14:54:15 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 81 (81) In the first days it's quite nice to get the daily messages, proof that one is indeed involved in an international network. But it does get out of hand, and I agree totally that the recent discussions of Nota Bene would have been best addressed to the originator of the query. However, to define and regulate where the fine line should be drawn between universal and personal interest seems an impossible task. As long as originators of general queries are prepared to send out summaries after a certain period, and as long as everyone else realises that a summary is forthcoming, the e-mail shouldn't be so clogged with preliminary remarks. Furthermore, it is easy enough to send a message direct to any originator and ask for a summary to be sent to Everyone if none appears. From: Dr Abigail Ann Young YOUNG at UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 16 June 1987, 08:35:33 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 82 (82) It seems to me that the flow of conversation on HUMANIST is just fine as it is: I think it's rather fun to have the sense of participation in an actual conversation. Still, I do realise that you may have to impose some kind of restraints on replies: but don't edit out the spontaneity of it! From: Sterling Bjorndahl - Claremont Grad. School Subject: Date: Tue, 16 Jun 87 09:10 PST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 83 (83) I agree that replies should go to the questioner and not the whole group. I don't know about other mail systems, but on Vax/VMS mail, when I use the "reply" command, the reply gets sent to the questioner, not the list. I think I have heard "somewhere" that this may not be true for all mailers, such as do not read the "reply-to:" line. From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 84 (84) We can have completely public discussion (everyone replies via the list to any query), with the result that the conference begins to resemble the transcripts one reads in accounts of CB radio conversations (or their simulations on Compuserve). Or we can have tightly controlled discussion (everyone replies to the querier, not to the list), in which case the conference typically resembles the transcript of a Mayday frequency: one call for help after another, and nothing much in between. The people who initiate the queries often fail to report back to the list on what they were told, and the result is in general a very boring conversation. Or we can attempt a middle ground: queries of limited general interest should be answered privately -- or rather I should say answers of limited general interest should be sent privately -- and those who initiate the query should ALWAYS report back to the list anything of general interest. I vote for the middle ground, with a strong leaning toward erring on the side of public conversation. For example, some of the remarks on Nota Bene lately have been probably better sent privately... and some are, I think, of public interest. But I'd rather that the whole be public than that the whole be private.... It seems to me to be a choice between a rather free, often unstructured and frustrating, but sometimes enlightening and exciting discussion, and a much more controlled but much less exciting or interesting discussion. From time to time, if the course of the conversation warrants it, you (or someone else) can issue a plea that purely private concerns be handled off the list, in direct notes. Or the query's originator (like Dr Young) can request private responses because of a conviction that the matter is not of public interest. But so far I haven't found myself regretting the volume of the conference. Quite the opposite, I am looking forward to a fairly vigorous discussion of the merits of Turbo and other Prologs. From: Jeffrey William Gillette Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 85 (85) Count my vote for your scheme. The Usenet system, which functions by broadcast, in a fashion very similar to your List Server, there is a continuing temptation to respond publically to specific questions of limited interest. The younger (and often imature) members of the Usenet community often respond to such abuses by inundating the offending party with unfriendly "flame" mail. I should hope that Humanist participants would possess sufficient professional courtesy and/or conscience to regulate themselves. If not, however, I might arrange to put some Usenet people onto the Humanist mailing list!!! From: DD ROBERTS (PHILOSOPHY) Subject: Date: Wed, 17 Jun 87 01:32:56 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 86 (86) I still am enjoying seeing responses to questions of others, and would like that to continue at least for a while. It is not difficult for me to dash through even large quantities of mail, now that I have decided to be quite hard nosed about it (if I'm not now able to use a thing, even if it sounds interesting, I delete it-- confident that if I should need it in the future, somebody out there would help). From: mbb@portia.Stanford.EDU Subject: Date: Wed, 17 Jun 87 10:06:15 -0800 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 87 (87) I most definitely agree with you: if person A asks "anyone know something about foo", then person B, in responding, should mail directly to A. Person A may want to synthesize the responses he/she gets and then send the synthesis to the general list. I have been the moderator for the TeX digest (TeXhax) for over six months, and this very thing can be a real pain. All it takes is for a few people to do the wrong thing to create a big mess. I imagine that most people use a mailing program and simply give some kind of "REPLY" command. The mailing program may grab the wrong address as the address to reply to. If there's one thing I've learned doing TeXhax, it's that mailer programs are really stupid, fussy and eccentric!! From: GW2%UK.AC.YORK.VAXA@AC.UK Subject: Date: 17-JUN-1987 11:45:43 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 88 (88) Never too much for me...I really do prefer to have access to all the open conversations in progress. Then I can choose which items to read and which to ignore. But it would help if everyone were more conscientious in their use of subject-headings. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 89 (89) [This message is 129 lines long.] From: LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK Subject: Date: 22-JUN-1987 09:37:59 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 90 (90) Does any Humanist have experience of using any of the various mainframe free text searching systems (e.g. Basis, Cairs, Stairs, Status, Assassin, 3IP, BRS/Search ...) on anything other than straightforward library catalogue type data? I'm on a UK interuniversity working party which is currently assessing the usefulness or otherwise of such packages and would be glad to hear from anyone (especially from outside the library/info science world) who's had hands on experience of such systems (and lived to tell the tale). I should add that we're considering buying such a system at Oxford t make some of the Text Archive materials more widely available, so any comments on how humanists would like to access e.g. the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton et al from online terminals would also be interesting Lou Burnard PS In line with Willard Directive #918365 this is a Public Communication, but replies to it should be Personal; I hereby undertake to recirculare such of them as seem generally interesting From: "Sterling Bjorndahl - Claremont Grad. School" Subject: "close" pattern matching Date: Mon, 22 Jun 87 07:49 PST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 91 (91) Dear HUMANIST readers: I would like to hear from those who know about "close" pattern matching algorithms, such as are used in microcomputer spelling checkers to suggest the word you *meant* instead of the non-word you *typed*. Is there a bibliography of published materials on how such algorithms are constructed? Do they use frequency tables, or hashing? Please reply to: BJORNDAS @ CLARGRAD on Bitnet. As a responsible electronic citizen, I promise to digest and report on replies (if any). Sterling Bjorndahl Institite for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont Graduate School Claremont, CA 91711 USA From: CATHERINE%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX2@AC.UK Subject: typography standards Date: 22-JUN-1987 12:55:57 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 92 (92) I am writing to add to the discussions about the decline in typesetting standards caused by desktop publishing. For some years now we at Oxford University Computing Service have supplied typesetting facilities to all British universities and polytechnics, as well as to several foreign universities. We have a Monotype Lasercomp for a typesetter, (and we hope in the fairly near future to have a PostScript typesetter). All we provide are the facilities (that is, the typesetter itself and a front end system in the form of a program called Laserset, which somewhat simplifies the commands and does syntax checking). Each user typesets his own document. By now around two hundred books have been typeset in this way. For the most part, the standard has been high, although there have of course been some notable exceptions. We ALWAYS strongly advise users to go to their publisher at the earliest stage possible, and have the typography department of the publisher design the book. When this is possible, the book should look exactly as good as any other book designed by that publisher. Problems arise, however, when the user does not yet have a publisher, or when the publisher does not have a typography department (this, unfortunately, is becoming more common). Our advice is then for the user to spend some time in libraries and bookshops looking for a suitable book whose format the user admires. It is then quite easy to use this as a model. We try to stress the importance of the look of the book, as it is easy with the Lasercomp to achieve high quality results if the design is good. It should be said that we are not engaged in desktop publishing; more in do-it-yourself publishing. Our system is probably at once easier and more difficult to abuse. We can achieve very fine control over the look of a page; finer than is possible with most desk-top publishing programs. However, no basic structure or design is imposed or even suggested, and there is nothing to stop an innocent user from producing a horrendous page. On the whole, however, our users have been quite conscientious and have made considerable efforts to produce texts which have a pleasing appearance. Perhaps this is in part because our system is a bit more difficult to use than a real desk top publishing system. The user must learn 'foreign' terms, such as pointsize, leading, hanging indents, kerning, film feeds and set feeds, all of which remind him that he is dabbling in an area of considerable tradition and expertise and art, and encourage him to walk with caution, possible even respect. Most of our users seem to feel that since they are taking the trouble to typeset their own work, they would like it to look good. From: Willard McCarty Subject: ICON and Prolog; UNIX for humanists Date: 22 June 1987, 15:13:47 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 93 (93) The following is from Joel Goldfield, with whom HUMANIST is having some trouble communicating. Please send all replies to the following network address: jdg at psc90.uucp From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 94 (94) ICON programming language vs. Prolog Dear Colleagues, Those of you interested in options to Prolog might like reading Mark Olsen's article on the ICON programming language in CHum, Jan.-March issue. He also discusses ICON in relation to SNOBOL. I would be interested in hearing from anyone also working with stylostatistical applications of UNIX and on friendly interfaces of the UNIX system for humanists. --Joel D. Goldfield From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Fri, 26 Jun 87 17:22:29 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 95 (95) I have got so desperate (sorry, gotten, for you people over the sea) that I have printed out two weeks worth of Humanist and am reading it through for things I forgot - so much for electronic browsing! Hands up all those who never do this. Points 1. yes, please sign notes. and say WHERE you are! i exchanged many notes with someone from bbn.alexander.com earlier this year without the faintest idea of where he physically was. (I know now, I asked him). 2. in re the note from Bill Winder about Prolog, can I reply here? i think it is an interesting issue. I have taught 4 languages to Arts students in the last few years (Prolog, Icon, Snobol and dBase command language) and I am not happy with any of them. To summarize what was said at a session at a conference in Southampton at Easter, a) the world doesnt want 3rd generation language programmers - it wants arts graduates with some experience in 4th generation tools, or MAYBE 5th generation languages). Ergo, teach them to use an SQL-based relational database system as the answer to almost everything (this view endorsed by a nice man from IBM) b) if you DO want a '5th gen.' language, then one tries Prolog. But its awful for a beginners course, because a) they have to learn an OS at the same time, b) the syntax is horrid, c) there is a lack of builtin functions (to sort a list, for instance), so students (well, mine) get depressed at lack of achievement. After all, all the beginning part of Prolog is much easier in a modern database. Now Turbo Prolog may get over problems b) and c) (especially if one installs the Toolbox which just came out), but a) remains , and you have the generic Prolog problems with large applications that Winder notes. I would STRONGLY criticise Turbo anyway for not implementing the pretty crucial feature of being able to assert newly learnt ideas during running. The reasons why you have to use the declaration section are clear enough, but that doesnt excuse Borland saying it is more or less C & S standard Prolog - it isnt. All that Turbo has is speed and the (wonderful) environment. You can also get those in a Prolog like Prolog II from Expert Systems International in Oxford, which provides a better growth system. Or to solve the 'large applications' problem, I propose to try next year teaching (aargh no keep away) IBM Prolog, with its interface to SQL/DS, which would take care of the donkey work. c) can I finally mention Icon? I tried this on 15 1st years, with disastrous results (maybe it was my teaching). there was too much syntax, to put it mildly (single and double quote mean different things, for instance), and the environment was non-existent. Do not get me wrong, I like Icon a lot and use it every day, but its for programmers who need it, not for beginners. Anyone care to comment? where does that leave Winder and his French lexicography? what about the Lisp-based stuff from Montreal (deredec etc)? maybe a dedicated class would like Icon. What are other peoples solutions? Question, why do Winders students need to learn programming at all? sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Willard McCarty Subject: Reminder about the Biographies Date: 28 June 1987, 23:36:54 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 96 (96) I am preparing to send out or otherwise offer the slightly edited collection of biographies of HUMANISTs to all of you, but I find that I don't have biographical statements from about half of the membership. If you want to have your background, interests, and professional activities known to the rest of us, and so be able to help us define what support of humanities computing means, please be sure that you have sent your statement to me by the end of this coming week. I have statements from the following people: ----- Baldini, Pier (ATPMB@ASUACAD) Balestri, Diane Bjorndahl, Sterling - Claremont Grad. School Borchardt, Frank L. Burkholder, Leslie Burnard, Lou Bush, Chuck Cameron, Keoth Camilleri, Lelio Candlin, Francis E. Cartwright, Dana E. 3rd Evra, James W. van (PHILOSOPHY DEPT.) Griffin, Catherine Hare, Roger Henry, Chuck Ide, Nancy M. Katzen, May Kaufman, Steve, Hebrew Union College account Kennedy, Mark T. Kruse, Susan Lowry, Anita Makkuni, Ranjit McCarty, Willard McCutchan, Walter Mok, Shu-Yan Nardocchio, Elaine Ore, Espen Owen, David -UA CCIT Academic Computing Page, Stephen Rahtz, Sebastian CMI011%UK.AC.SOTON.IBM@AC.UK Richmond, S. ROBERTS, D. D. (PHILOSOPHY) Sano, Haj Sousa, Ronald de Swenson, Eva V. Thornton, Dave or Wall, Geoffrey Weinshank, Don Wiebe, M.G. Young, Abigail Ann Zacour, Norman ----- Thanks very much. Yours, W.M. From: "Stuart Hunter, University of Guelph" Subject: PROLOG, LISP, AI, and all that stuff. Date: Fri, 26 Jun 87 14:43:52 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 97 (97) In response to Sebastian's recent comment, I have to ask who the "they" is that wants Arts students exposed to 5th generation languages? In the long run, how many of our "run of the mill" undergraduates do we want to expose to anything more that a "competent user" level of familiarity? Don't get me wrong: I'm all for training Humanities scholars in the use of expert systems and 5th-generation languages to solve the basic problems that we, as humanist, tackle. On the other hand, I know that the majority of the undergraduate I deal with couldn't formulate a statement about many of those problems, let alone design an expert system to cope with the problems. I think we have to distinguish between what we are teaching to -- or are using to teach to -- undergraduates and what we need to know ourselves in order to teach and do our research. And that brings me back to Sebastian's statement about "them". Who is it that wants Arts Students who are experts in Prolog? From: Willard McCarty Subject: Article in SCOPE 5.2 (March-April 1987): 13, 19. Date: 1 July 1987, 14:09:01 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 98 (98) Those of you at ICCH87 who attended the meeting in which the idea for HUMANIST was born will remember that Joe Raben, publisher of CHum and editor of SCOPE, was there. He has described that meeting and its significance in the latest issue of SCOPE. As one of the pioneers of computing in the humanities, Joe must be very familiar with the role of revolutionary outcast and with what one must do to keep the faith, and keep it intelligently, in a time of little recognition or outright rejection. His counsels have an authority for that reason. Joe calls us "the avant-garde, who are uniting humanistic values with technological means." He says that we are developing "a broader vision [than our counterparts in traditional fields] by serving colleagues from many departments," thus learning "the skills of many disciplines." He compares us to the anthropologists, who emerged from history and classics, to psychologists from philosophy, and to linguists from language departments. "And in every case, the exiles have developed more rapidly as innovators and challengers of received knowledge." He recommends that academics without a proper job turn the university's rejection to their advantage by using the time liberated from teaching to develop knowledge and skills far beyond what is possible for their teaching colleagues. Then he gets to us HUMANISTs. "In better touch with comrades on other campuses, because they understand and utilize computer-based communications, they will forge an association with a potential far beyond that of current professional organizations." No academic without a proper appointment needs to be told the other side of the story. I think it's useful, however, to be shown the golden aspects of what usually seems an iron-aged actuality. Nevertheless, if the gold's to be grasped, I also think we need to develop some clear notions of how computing in the humanities can make a scholarly contribution to scholarship. Hand-waving won't help, nor will promises to prove the unprovable. Speaking in terms of my own field, I am forced by experience to recognize the necessarily tentative (and therefore disturbing) nature of literary arguments: like us they're mortal and problematic, but also like us they can occasionally reach beyond our historical and personal limitations. I don't see anything wrong with the traditional scholarly values, which most of our non-computing colleagues appear not to follow anyhow, but I do see great dangers still in pseudo-scientific ideas of truth, evidence, and proof. They will discredit as well as mislead us. So what can computing do for us as scholars that itself deserves a place in scholarship? Good answers to this question should be translatable into software and so be put to the test. [This message is about 50 lines long.] From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Thu, 2 Jul 87 12:03:02 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 99 (99) What about some light relief? Those of you who are Unix types may have come across 'fortune cookies' or 'yow' (part of Gnuemacs), which print a random line or two of wisdom on the screen when invoked. It is also used in my department as part of a lock screen on Sun workstations; systems which are not in use sit and display random quotes at intervals on the screen to stop any given message burning into the phosphor (is this true?). so what, you say? well, in an effort to justify humanities in a computer science world, I have replaced the 'yow' database with verses of poetry (all of TS Eliot, most of Bob Dylan and a lot of Brian Patten). What a relief to have pithy thoughts come up every so often instead of mindless American aphorisms! who said poetry had no place in the modern world? sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Willard McCarty Subject: Biographies Date: 4 July 1987, 14:57:04 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 100 (100) All of you should receive within the next day or so the file HUMANIST BIOGRAFY, ca. 50K, 950 lines. Please let me know if it does not arrive intact. As soon as we figure out how to keep files centrally, on UTORONTO, I'll put HUMANIST BIOGRAFY there. It will then be your responsibility to keep your entry updated. Any changes or additions should be sent to me directly. I'd also like to hear from you if you have any suggestions or comments about the format or contents of this file. If a sufficient number of you who didn't send in an entry do so in the near future, I'll issue a supplement. Approximately 5/8 of the membership is represented in the current file. From: Willard McCarty Subject: address correction Date: 5 July 1987, 12:12:30 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 101 (101) In HUMANIST BIOGRAFY Leslie Burkholder's e-mail address was incorrectly given. Mea culpa. It should be as follows: lb0q@te.cc.cmu.edu.bitnet OR lb0q#@andrew.cmu.edu.bitnet OR lb0q#@andrew.cmu.edu.arpanet From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 11:00:41 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 102 (102) I forgot to say in my note about the Uses and Abuses of Poetry that, of course, the source for my text of TS Eliot and Bob Dylan was Lou Burnard's _Oxford Text Archive_. Jolly highly recommended... The interesting point arises of copyright etc; these bleeding chunks of poetry (a verse or 10 lines, whichever is shorter) are displayed under control of a program which the average punter cannot get at; nor can they normally access the source file. So to that extent I am not giving the text out to all and sundry. Nor am I 'publishing' it in a form that a literary person could read for sense. But if you were sufficiently patient you could acquire the whole of the Waste Land bit by bit, like a jigsaw. Ergo, I ask you all - is this publication? Have we identified a way in which electronic media genuinely confuse the issue? sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: copyright Rahtz's copyright conundrum Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 12:13:16 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 103 (103) REPLY TO 07/06/87 11:00 FROM CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK: copyright Sebastian Rahtz's example of semi-/may-be-/may-not-be "publication" of Eliot and Dylan lyrics provides an interesting thought experiment. Is displaying such small chunks of verse on a screen, at random, "publication"? I think there must be two issues here: is it publication if we quote only small pieces of the text? and is it publication if we only show the pieces on a VDT, as opposed to paper? I think both are interesting questions. If my understanding of copyright doctrine is correct, though, the lawyers have already answered the first question: quotation of a line or two of verse -- particularly of a song lyric -- counts as publication and normally requires permission of the copyright holder. Hence the distracting copyright notices you see at the bottom of pages where a short story writer has quoted a popular song for atmosphere. (This may be different in the UK, but I always thought your copyright laws were more stringent, not less, than ours.) On the second issue, one might argue that display on a screen in a public place is a "making public" and thus a "publication." I assume the publishers line up here. One might conversely argue that a departmental terminal room is not really public, and thus preserve the refreshingly literate air of the place by claiming that this should fall into the "fair use" category. I would hate to see this use turn out to be a copyright violation! Medievalists have it easier, I think: if I put stanzas of Minnesang or random quotations from Chaucer up (and got them from a nineteenth-century edition), the copyright issue would not arise. (And if I used a twentieth-century edition, chances are very slim that anyone could tell the difference.) On the other hand, none of the terminal users would understand them. Perhaps one could use Wyatt, Donne, or Sidney? From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:31:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 104 (104) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:34:30 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 105 (105) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:37:27 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 106 (106) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:41:04 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 107 (107) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:44:50 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 108 (108) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:48:21 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 109 (109) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:52:01 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 110 (110) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:55:29 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 111 (111) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 16:59:28 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 112 (112) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 17:03:14 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 113 (113) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 17:07:04 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 114 (114) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 17:11:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 115 (115) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: Graeme Hirst Subject: I am on vacation. Date: Mon, 6 Jul 87 17:12:47 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 116 (116) I am on vacation until 10 August 1987. This message is sent automatically by the mailer. For urgent matters concerning /Canadian AI/, contact the new editor, Marlene Jones, 403-297-2666, marlene@noah.arc.cdn. Graeme Hirst From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Tue, 7 Jul 87 11:01:29 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 117 (117) If no more notes appear from me, you can assume the Bob Dylan, Brian Patten and the executors of TS Eliot have haled me off to jail. I think I will put up Chaucer instead... the suggestion of Donne is ironic, in that the machines concerned are called Donne, Webster, Spenser, Jonson, Marlowe and Fletcher. Yesterday Jonson's lock screen display quoted that bit of Eliot about Webster and Donne to me. Anyway, can I return to the question of teaching Prolog? Scott Campbell asks who wants Arts graduates who know Prolog, as opposed to those who have 'a "competent user" level of familiarity'. I disagree with Scott on two points: a) Arts graduates are no different or worse than anyone else. ie they are likely to go into the big bad world and work in a big business. and what will they use in the BBW? - spreadsheets, word-processing and simple database querying - hence the argument for teaching use of SQL, as it gives a very convenient upgrade path to a fuller understanding of relational database design, and mapping of the real world into that way of thinking. So to that extent, no programming need be taught at all. b) I dont agree (pace Philippe Kahn) that "Prolog = AI = 5th generation" ; on the one hand there are expert systems, and there is AI, which may find Prolog a suitable vehicle; but on the other there are 5th generation languages (of which Prolog is a crude example) which many people (supposedly) find easier to use on a day to day basis. You can do anything you like with Prolog, so it need not be seen as an either/or situation, with Prolog or Lisp being seen as only suitable for expert systems, and Icon seen as only suitable for string processing. All these computer languages are problem-solving notations, which different people may find more or less easier to use to solve their given problem. I suppose the question is whether undergraduates have problems to solve; my argument is the specious and out-dated one that learning to solve problems with a formal notation is fun, interesting and vaguely useful. There is a much stronger argument, though, that the students EXPECT to learn some programming. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Willard McCarty Subject: Vapographies Date: 7 July 1987, 10:12:25 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 118 (118) Some HUMANISTs in the UK have complained that HUMANIST BIOGRAFY has not arrived. Please let me know immediately if you haven't received your copy, and I'll send it forthwith. From: CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@AC.UK Subject: Date: Tue, 7 Jul 87 17:15:47 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 119 (119) Job Advertisement ----------------- I would be grateful if HUMANIST readers could draw the attention of job-seekers in their locality to a post of Research Assistant in the Departments of Electronics & Computer Science, and Archaeology, in the University of Southampton, UK; we need someone to work on an graphical database of archaeological artifacts. I can send more details as required, but basically we are after someone with graphical/image-processing background in computer science, and some archaeology. The post is for 2 years, and pays c. 10,000 pounds p.a. Work will be in Southampton on a Sun workstation. Thanks. Please direct enquiries (applications need to be within a month or so) to me: cmi011@uk.ac.soton.ibm sebastian rahtz, computer science, southampton, UK From: Willard McCarty Subject: The ACH and the ALLC Date: 7 July 1987, 22:10:08 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 120 (120) ____________________________________________________________________ | The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) | | and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) | ------------------------------------------------------------------- The following describes the two professional associations that sponsor HUMANIST. For further information, please contact the named individuals directly. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The ACH - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Association for Computers and the Humanities is an international organization devoted to encouraging the development and use of computers and computing techniques in humanities research and education. Traditionally, ACH has fostered computer-aided research in literature and language, history, philosophy, anthropology, and related social sciences as well as computer use in the creation and study of art, music, and dance. As computing applications in the humanities have developed and broadened in the 1980s, the Association has expanded its scope to include areas from word processing to computer-assisted instruction in composition, language, history, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as computational linguistics and cognitive science, which overlap increasingly with work in the area of humanities computing. Founded in 1977, ACH is the primary professional society in the U.S. for scholars involved or interested in any aspect of humanities computing. The Association provides a forum for continuing communication about humanities computing and strives to meet the needs of those who want to gain familiarity with both existing and potential applications of computers in humanities disciplines. Publications ACH members receive a subscription to Computers and the Humanities, a quarterly journal devoted to scholarship in the field of humanities computing. CHum is published 4 times a year by Paradigm Press. The heart of ACH is its quarterly newsletter, which covers the activities of the Association and its members and includes articles on various areas within humanities computing, news of projects and conferences of interest to ACH members, and reports on the activities of governmental agencies and other organizations that affect computer-aided humanities research. Meetings ACH sponsors the bi-annual International Conference on Computers and the Humanities (ICCH), held in odd-numbered years, which brings together scholars from around the world to report on research activities and software and hardware developments in the field. Recently, ACH began to sponsor conferences and workshops on specialized topics in humanities computing, held in even-numbered years. The Ninth International Conference for Computers and the Humanities (ICCH/89) will be held in conjunction with the annual conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing in Toronto, Canada, in June 1989. In June 1988, ACH will sponsor a conference on Teaching Computers and the Humanities Courses, to be held at Oberlin College in Ohio. Affiliations Because of the interdisciplinary nature of humanities computing, ACH maintains close ties with a number of organizations with overlapping interests, in order to provide its members with information from within specialized areas of the field of humanities computing and to keep others informed of work within the discipline. ACH is closely allied with the European-based Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and co-sponsors its annual conference. ACH is also closely allied with the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACH sponsors sessions devoted entirely to humanities computing at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and at the National Educational Computing Conference. Membership Membership is for the calendar year and is open to all scholars interested in humanities computing. The benefits include Subscription to the quarterly ACH Newsletter. Subscription to Computers and the Humanties. The options of subscribing to SCOPE (Scholarly Communications: On line Publishing and Education), Research in Word Processing Newsletter, and Bits and Bytes Review at reduced rates. Reduced registration fee at the International Conference on Computers and the Humanities and at meetings of the Assocation for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Reduced membership fee in ACH regional affiliate organizations. Discounts on books and special issues of journals devoted to humanities computing. The intangible benefits derived from associating with others who are interested and involved in humanities computing! Membership information ACH MEMBERSHIP Individual: $40 (US) Includes subscription to ACH Newsletter and Computers and the Humanities. NOTE: all issues of both publications for the current year will be sent. OPTIONAL FEES (in US $): NORTHEAST (REGIONAL) ACH MEMBERSHIP $10.00 per year for ACH members SUBSCRIPTION TO SCOPE $25.00 for 6 issues SUBSCRIPTION TO RESEARCH IN WORD PROCESSING NEWSLETTER $12.00 for 9 issues SUBSCRIPTION TO BITS & BYTES REVIEW $40.00 for 9 issues Send application form to : Harry Lincoln, Treasurer Association for Computers and the Humanities Department of Music SUNY Binghamton, New York 13901 -------------------------------------------------------------------- The ALLC -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) brings together all who have an interest in using computers in the analysis of text. It is an international and cross-disciplinary association, whose members are drawn from subjects such as literature, linguistics, lexicography, psychology, history, law and computer science. The ALLC works closely with the American-based Association for Computers and the Humanities. Publications The ALLC was founded in 1973 and from 1973 to 1985 published the ALLC Bulletin three times per year. The ALLC Journal with two issues per year began publication in 1980. In 1986 Oxford University Press took over publication of the ALLC periodicals to form a new quarterly journal, Literary and Linguistic Computing. Individual membership of the Association is now by subscription to Literary and Linguistic Computing. Literary and Linguistic Computing contains scholarly refereed papers on all aspects of computing applied to literature and language with the emphasis as much on the computing techniques as on the results of research projects. The range of coverage extends to hardware and software, computer-assisted language learning, word-processing for applications in the humanities, and the teaching of computing techniques to students of language and literature. The journal also has news and notes, diary, bibliography and other items of current interest. Conferences The ALLC organises a general conference on literary and linguistic computing in even-numberedhnears and a conference on a specialist theme in odd-numbered years, when it also co-sponsors the ICCH conferences organised by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. ALLC and ACH members are entitled to reduced rates at ALLC-sponsored events. Recent specialist themes have been Quantitative Methods (Nice, 1985) and Linguistic Databases (Gothenburg, 1987). The next ALLC conference will be held in Jerusalem on 5-9 June 1988 immediately before the second conference of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique (Computers and the Bible). In 1989 the ALLC conference will be in conjunction with ICCH89 in Toronto, Canada. The proceedings of the ALLC conferences are published by Slatkine of Geneva in a volume of selected papers. Representatives The ALLC has representatives in approximately thirty countries or geographical areas as well as representatives for some twenty-five subject areas. Representatives provide information for the ALLC membership by means of survey papers, organising special sessions at conferences and answering queries and requests for information. They are also able to publicise the ALLC in their own area or discipline. Membership Subscription rates are: Individual Institution UK 12 pounds 24 pounds N. America US$22.50 US$45 Elsewhere 14 pounds 28 pounds Subscriptions should be sent to Winifred Moranville or Journals Subscriptions Journals Marketing Oxford University Press Oxford University Press Walton Street 200 Madison Avenue Oxford New York OX2 6DP NY 10016 UK Payment may be made by credit card. Back issues of the periodicals may also be obtained from Oxford University Press. Contributions to Literary and Linguistic Computing should be sent to Mr Gordon Dixon, Editor-in-Chief, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Institute of Advanced Studies, Manchester Polytechnic, All Saints Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M5 6BH, UK, electronic mail NPUM01@UK.AC.UMIST.CN.PA [on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN: NPUM01 at PA.CN.UMIST.AC.UK]. Further information may be obtained from the Honorary Secretary, Dr T N Corns, Department of English, University College of North Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, UK, electronic mail V002@UK.AC.BANGOR.VAXA [on Bitnet &c.: V002 at VAXA.BANGOR.AC.UK] or the ALLC Chairman, Mrs Susan Hockey, Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK, electronic mail SUSAN@UK.AC.OX.VAX2 [on Bitnet &c.: SUSAN at VAX2.OX.AC.UK]. From: Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 Subject: teaching arts students Prolog Date: 8 July 1987, 12:08:42 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 121 (121) I am interested by this not from the point of view of a teacher of arts students, which alas! I am not, but as someone who herself had to learn a programming language "late in life" (ca 30) and on her own. It was hard. Aspects of it were not fun. What I was learning was "C" and the applications were very picayune, really, but also very picky and precise. (I assume, by the way, that "5th generation languages" are something bigger, better, and brighter than "C:" it is interesting to see how the Whig view of progress in history as positive lives on in our attitudes towards "progressive" generations of machines and languages.) But what saved me from total frustration and eventual failure was that I had a great deal of experience in learning and teaching natural languages with very strict syntactic and accidental conventions; and that when I was in school "problem-solving" was part of maths. What I mean is that we were taught how to approach problems in an analytical way while we were also being taught geometry and trigonometry. I don't remember much of the maths (if I had been one of the characters in the Musgrave Ritual the body would never have been found) but the lessons in analysis enabled me to understand the idea behind algorithms, etc, in the computer books I was banging my head against. So it seems to me that Sebastian Rahtz has a very good point about the effect on arts students of their learning programming. Perhaps they will never use the particular language you teach them, *but* they will learn how to approach and analyze a problem from a computational point of view. And that will help them both in the Big Bad World, if they have to use computers at all in their work; and in the academic world (the Little Bad World?) where humanists need more than ever to understand how to express a problem clearly in computational terms in order to get not just a correct answer but the correct answer to the question they want to ask. It will also help them, if they remain in the academic world, to view with proper skepticism both those humanists who deny that the computer can be a valuable tool (and they still exist, pace the latest issue of ACH Newsletter) and those who think the computer can solve any question it is worthwhile asking better than a human being can. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 8 July 1987, 18:26:44 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 122 (122) The following was intended to be a note to all HUMANISTs but did not get processed properly. I'm simply passing it on. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ >Date: Wed, 8 Jul 87 10:52:09 edt >From: jdg%psc90.UUCP@DARTMOUTH.EDU (Dr. Joel Goldfield) >Message-Id: <8707081452.AA17538@psc90.UUCP> >To: ihnp4!princeton!seismo!HUMANIST@utoronto >Subject: > >String-processing languages > In response to the comments of Sebastian Rahtz and others concerning >PROLOG, ICON and string processing let me add one more: researchers who >have access to the UNIX system may find 'awk' to be helpful. Named after >its inventors at Bell Labs (Abbo, Weinberger & Kernigan, I believe, at >the Murray Hill, NJ, facility) it's extremely dense and fast. While the >original documentation is sparse and esoteric, recent books on the UNIX >system have apparently tried to correct this problem. > For information on the ICON language, see Mark Olsen's article >in CHum, Jan.-March, 1987. There's a bit of undefined "jargon" in it, >but mainly geared toward humanists' interests. I describe my applications >of 'awk' in the article appearing in vol. 1 of the ALLC publication that >Etienne Brunet edited for Slatkine (1986), pp. 455-465 approximately. > --Joel D. Goldfield > Plymouth State College (NH, USA) From: Willard McCarty Subject: ALLC/AIBI Conference Announcement & Call for Papers Date: 8 July 1987, 18:33:16 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 123 (123) -------------------------- ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences June 1988 -- Jerusalem, Israel Preliminary Announcement The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique (AIBI) invite you to attend their International Conferences to be held in June 1988 in Jerusalem. The Fifteenth Annual Conference of ALLC will take place on June 5-9, 1988, and it will be followed immediately by the Second Conference of AIBI on June 9-13, 1988. The conferences are jointly organized by the Organizing Committee in Israel (which will also serve as the Conference Committee for the ALLC one), but the procedures for papers' submission and selection and for registrations will be kept separate. A significant discount will be given, however, for a joint registration, to encourage attendees of each conference to attend the other one also, thus enhancing fruitful exchanges and communications between researchers of closely related interests. Special registration rates will also apply to speakers, students, and members of sponsoring institutions. The conferences are sponsored and supported by a number of academic and professional societies and organizations that will be listed in future mailings. A ``Call for Papers'' for the ALLC conference is enclosed; a ``Call for Papers'' for the AIBI one is being mailed separately. The coordination between the two programs will be assured by a special panel consisting of Y. Choueka and R.-F. Poswick. Both conferences will consist of invited lectures, contributed papers, panels, product-review sessions, poster displays, exhibits and demonstrations. Standard hardware and communications equipment for on-line demonstrations and large-screen displays will be available on site. Every effort will be made to meet special hardware needs if a detailed request is sent well in advance to the Organizing Committee. Selected papers from the two conferences will be published in two separate Proceedings volumes. The conferences will be accompanied by an exhibition of hardware, software, books and other products and services relevant, in general, to the computing-in-the-humanities domain. The timing of the conferences was specially chosen so as to coincide (hopefully...) with some of the most glorious sunny days that Jerusalem can offer, and to assure availability (and lower fares...) of air tickets and hotel rooms, while avoiding the rush summer season when tourists usually crowd the city. A rich and interesting series of cultural, social and tourist events for the registrants and their parties will accompany the conferences. A few Mediterranean beaches, beautiful in so many ways, are also about one hour of driving from Jerusalem; far enough so as not to distract the conscientious wisdom seeker, but close enough for an occasional refreshing jump to the sun-and-sea worshipper... The fascinating appeal and haunting beauty of Jerusalem, with its multi-cultural environments and institutions, its intriguing history, and its unique human and architectural landscapes, coupled with the anticipated characteristic ambiance usually associated with scientific activities and the gathering of scholars and researchers from all over the world, will certainly turn these meetings into an exciting professional and cultural event. So, mark these dates on your calendar, and plan early to join us in June 1988 in Jerusalem. Don't miss this excellent opportunity for an enriching scientific and human experience. In order to receive future mailings about the conferences, and to help us better plan them, please return the enclosed Notification Form, duly filled out, as soon as possible. For further information on the conferences and their programs, and for suggestions for panels, tutorials, etc., please write to the Organizing Committee at the address given in the enclosed form. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 124 (124) ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences 5-13 June 1988, Jerusalem Organizing Committee: Yaacov Choueka, Chairman Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan (visiting Bell Communications Research, Morristown) Hillel Weiss, Coordinator Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan Daniel Boyarin Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan Itamar Even-Zohar Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv Ariel Frank Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan Reuven Mirkin Academy of Hebrew Language, Jerusalem Uzzi Ornan The Hebrew University, Jerusalem Yehuda Radday Technion, Haifa Address: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100 electronic mail: R70016%BARILAN.BITNET choueka@bimacs.bitnet From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 125 (125) Notification Form Mail to: Organizing Committee ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences Deprtment of Mathematics and Computer Science Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100 Title_______Name_________________________________________________ Affiliation______________________________________________________ Address__________________________________________________________ Tel._______________ e-mail address___________________ __ Please send me more information when available __ Please send me the Call for Papers of the AIBI conference __ I plan to attend __ ALLC Conf. __ AIBI Conf. __ Both Conf. __ I plan to submit a paper to __ ALLC __ AIBI Tentative Title: _______________________________________________________________ __ I propose the following panel to the __ALLC __AIBI conference: _______________________________________________________________ From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 126 (126) Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Fifteenth Annual Conference 5-9 June 1988, Jerusalem Literary and Linguistic Computing-1988 The Fifteenth Annual Conference of ALLC will be held on 5-9 June 1988 in Jerusalem. As has been traditional with ALLC meetings, the full spectrum of literary and linguistic computing in general is expected to be covered at the conference. Specific topics which are currently under vigorous research, such as large textual databases and corpora and linguistic computing in multi-lingual environments, are naturally expected to receive special attention. Papers are invited on substantial unpublished research on the main themes of the conference and similar related areas such as: -computational morphology, syntax and semantics -computational lexicography and lexicology -mechanized dictionaries, lexicons and grammars -lemmatization and parsing -ambiguity and its mechanical resolution -stylistic analysis and authorship studies -statistical linguistics and metrics -research tools: corpora, concordances, indexes and thesauri -full-text systems -natural language understanding -text processing and retrieval Papers that present specific theoretical models coupled with new experimental results are particularly welcome, but contributions dealing with critical evaluations, general reviews and appraisal of theoretical models, software packages and specialized hardware will be also considered. General descriptions of on-going long-range projects are acceptable only if they contain substantial new and unpublished information. Authors should send 6 copies of a one-page abstract and a cover sheet in the format, and to the address, given below. Abstracts should clearly point to the originality and importance of the contribution and its relevance to the conference, and should clarify the operational status of described projects; vague or unsubstantiated claims and plans for the future will be given little weight. Priority in evaluation and consideration will be given to abstracts that are accompanied by an Extended Abstract of 4-6 pages (6 copies). Although not formally required, authors are urged to include these extended abstracts, so as to help making the reviewing process more reliable and balanced. Papers must be received by December 15, 1987. Authors will be notified for acceptance by February 29, 1988. Based on the contribution's contents and on the feedback from the conference, papers will be then selected for inclusion in the Proceedings volume to be published by Slatkine (Geneve). The happy selected authors will be notified by the end of June 1988, and a camera-ready version of the full-length papers must be received by August 15, 1988. Opportunity will be thus given to the authors to include in the final version any refinements or clarifications called for by the oral presentation and its feedback. More details on local arrangements and accomodations, registration fees and forms, etc., will be given in the second call for papers to be mailed during winter 1987. If you would like to receive future mailings, and certainly if you plan to submit a paper or just to attend the conference, please mail the enclosed notification note immediately. Format for submissions: Cover Sheet: ------------ ABSTRACT SUBMITTED TO ALLC 1988 Title Author Affiliation Complete address,including tel. and e-mail address Subject identification (e.g. statistical linguistics, morphological disambiguation, etc.) Abstract -------- Title Author ABSTRACT the text of the abstract, one page of about 30 single-spaced lines (in elite, pica or roman type, 10-12 points). Extended Abstract: ------------------ Title Author EXTENDED ABSTRACT text, 4-6 pages with the same format as the abstract. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 127 (127) International Advisory Board Paul Bratley Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec Jacqueline Hamesse Universite Catholique, Louvain-La-Neuve R.-F. Poswick Bible et Informatique, Maredsous Klaus M. Schmidt Bowling Green State University, Ohio Don Walker Bell Communications Research, Morristown, New Jersey ----------------------- Important deadlines December 15, 1987 paper submission February 29, 1988 author notification April 5, 1988 end of early registration August 15, 1988 camera-ready version of full papers for the Proceedings ------------------------------ From: Willard McCarty Subject: On the teaching of Prolog Date: 9 July 1987, 16:43:34 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 128 (128) The following is from Eva Swenson (ESWENSON at UTORONTO): ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I have been observing the exchange of views regarding the teaching of PROLOG. I think that providing undergraduates with problem-solving tools is good. Pick your favorite tool(s). It does not matter. However, I think that the more basic task is to teach undergraduates, and people in general, how to recognize problems, identify and characterize them, understand their nature. And then to determine which tool may be appropriate for the problem. In my experience, I find that undergraduates (and some instructors) have no patience for this. The tendency is to get to the tool (or toy) as quickly as possible and to try to use it to solve ALL problems. As the saying goes: when one has learned how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is why I would caution one from trying to learn about relational databases by starting with SQL. Like learning what a nail is about by studying how to use a hammer. Eva Swenson. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Not me.... Date: 10 July 1987, 15:46:26 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 129 (129) A GUIDE TO THE TRANSLATION OF TECHNICAL PUBLICATIONS o "It is believed that ..." (I think.) o "It is generally believed that ..." (A couple of my friends think so too.) o "It has long been know that ..." (I didn't bother to look up the original reference.) o "While I have not found definite answers to these questions ..." (The data made no sense, but I'm publishing them anyway.) o "It might be argued that ..." (I can answer this objection so well that I shall now raise it.) o "Of great theoretical and practical importance ..." (Somewhat interesting to me.) o "Of extreme purity, ultrapure ..." (Composition unknown.) o "Qualitatively correct ... correct within an order of magnitude." (Wrong.) o "Three samples were chosen for detailed study ..." (The others didn't make sense.) o "Typical results are shown in Fig. 2" (The best results are shown in Fig. 2.) o "The most reliable values are given by Smith ..." (Smith is a friend of mine.) o "Subjected to controlled stress during the experiment ..." (Accidentally dropped on the floor.) o "Handled with extreme care during the experiment ..." (Not dropped on the floor.) o "A discussion of the remaining data will be forthcoming ..." (Some of my results don't make sense.) o "A complete understanding clearly requires much more work ..." (None of my results make sense.) o "I would be remiss not to thank Archibald Thankery for assistance with the experimental aspects of this investigation, and Dr. Samuel Hirschfeld for helpful comments during the analytical phase ..." (Archie did all the work, and then Sam explained it to me.) __________________________________________________________________________ Keebler { hua@cmu-cs-gandalf.arpa } From: Steve Younker Subject: HUMANIST Loops Date: Mon, 13 Jul 87 14:10:36 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 130 (130) I feel today is a good day to send a message out to all subscribers of UofT's HUMANIST discussion group based on the events of the past week. Any of you who were members of this group a week ago will recall that one of your colleagues went on holiday. Before he left he ensured that any messages that arrived in his 'computer mail box' were answered by an automatic program that informed the sender that he was away. To make a long story short this automatic program got into an electronic discussion with the HUMANIST program at UTORONTO. Since all of you are privy to any electronic conversations that occur with HUMANIST, you all received a ton of electronic mail. Since each piece of mail was essentially the same, it made for some extraordinarily boring reading. Fortunately, Willard was able to catch this process before the network wires began to melt under the load. This morning I came in to work and found a complaint in mailbox from the U.K. about this incident. The person requested that I ensure that this situation would not be repeated in the future for it was inconvenient and expensive to those in the U.K. due to network charges. First of all, I have replied to the individual concerned and I hope I have dealt with his concerns. However, I thought that there may be more of you who were 'silently' annoyed by the incident. So I felt that a full explanation is probably in order. I discussed this with Willard and he agreed. I realize that such an incident can be annoying, but the nature of the beast, (computers) dictates that these 'bugs' will occur from time to time and cannot be predicted. In this case, a user on another computer installed a piece of software that had, to say the least, a devasting effect when it began to 'talk' with HUMANIST. The user involved is not under Willard's control or mine. Indeed, the user could have been anywhere in the world. Willard and I have attempted to set up HUMANIST in such a manner to be as useful to all as humanly possible. Some of you may remember that DARTVAX ran amok in a similar fashion when the discussion group began. That situation was also rather obscure. The point is, computer loops will occur from time to time and some of them cannot be predicted or prevented. I ask you all to react in a kindly manner. Simply smile, laugh, swear a bit maybe, delete the offending files, and carry on enjoying the benefits of HUMANIST. Willard and I realize that this is a new medium for some of you and we will endeavour to provide this service with the minimum of bother and confusion. To make HUMANIST a useful and an efficient medium, I urge you all to keep Willard and/or myself informed of your likes and dislikes of the service provided. I believe the benefits to the academic world far outweigh the occasional annoyance of a computer bug. If you wish to express any concerns that may not be of interest to all members of HUMANIST, please feel free to contact me directly at: POSTMSTR@UTORONTO Steve Younker, Postmaster - University of Toronto From: ATMKO@ASUACADATMKO at ASUACAD Subject: Date: 20 July 1987, 19:25:27 MST20 July 1987, 19:10:25 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 131 (131) Dear Humanist, For a while we were snowed under tons of junk mail and now nothing. Is Humanist alive? Has Humanist fallen victim to an international version of core wars? Did the system operators at CUNY "hit" the misguided list server with a mega-byte of zeros. Please, Arizona is too hot and lonely to be deprived of humanist. The following program was downloaded from the Catspaw bulletin board and requires SNOBOL4+ to run. It is forwarded to Humanist in order to make your life more economical and interesting. * INSIDER.SNO * Produces an industry insider report, * thus saving the cost and nuisance of reading * Infoworld, PC Week, Microbytes, John Dvorak, etc. * * * Set keywords -plusops 1 &trim = 1 &anchor = 1 &maxlngth = 32767 * Use system clock to seed the random-number generator * Define your arrays * Blueboy is the I B M whatever blueboy = array('10') blueboy[1] = 'official' blueboy[2] = 'executive' blueboy[3] = 'vice-president' blueboy[4] = 'officer' blueboy[5] = 'manager' blueboy[6] = 'source' blueboy[7] = 'consultant' blueboy[8] = 'engineer' blueboy[9] = 'vice-president' blueboy[10] = 'vice-president' * newspeak is verb for his statement newspeak = array('10') newspeak[1] = 'confirmed' newspeak[2] = 'denied' newspeak[3] = 'refused to confirm or deny' newspeak[4] = 'refused to comment on' newspeak[5] = 'denied any knowledge of' newspeak[6] = 'agreed that there might be some validity to' newspeak[7] = 'denied' newspeak[8] = 'been uncharacteristically forthright about' newspeak[9] = 'taken the Fifth Amendment when asked about' newspeak[10] = 'been involuntarily retired after prematurely confirmin g' * hearsay is his statement hearsay = array('10') hearsay[1] = 'reports' hearsay[2] = 'an article in Tass' hearsay[3] = 'industry rumors' hearsay[4] = 'authoritative gossip' hearsay[5] = 'unsubstantiated dispatches' hearsay[6] = 'widespread speculation' hearsay[7] = 'unofficial reports' hearsay[8] = 'high-level rumors' hearsay[9] = 'leaks from beta-testers' hearsay[10] = 'informed conjectures' * newstuff is the next product newstuff = array('10') newstuff[1] = 'system' newstuff[2] = 'architecture' newstuff[3] = 'CPU' newstuff[4] = 'system bus' newstuff[5] = 'token-ring network' newstuff[6] = 'local-area network' newstuff[7] = 'entry-level product' newstuff[8] = 'top-end workstation' newstuff[9] = 'video display standard' newstuff[10] = 'operating system' * saywhat is an attribute of the new syste, saywhat = array('10') saywhat[1] = 'be totally proprietary' saywhat[2] = 'run under Microsoft Windows' saywhat[3] = 'be based on the Intel 80486' saywhat[4] = 'remain a closely-held secret until the end of the centur y' saywhat[5] = 'be generally compatible with existing systems' saywhat[6] = 'use a subset of the OS/360 instruction set' saywhat[7] = 'employ scalar interrupts and extensive masked gate array s' saywhat[8] = 'be introduced in the near future' saywhat[9] = 'have DB-15 connectors' saywhat[10] = 'be produced by robots in Singapore' * bluesite is where they're doing it bluesite = array('10') bluesite[1] = 'a product suitability testing facility' bluesite[2] = 'several gamma-test sites' bluesite[3] = 'a national refuge for migrating data' bluesite[4] = 'IRS offices' bluesite[5] = 'proposed MX missile bases' bluesite[6] = 'the corporate detention center for dress-code violators ' bluesite[7] = 'a detoxification clinic' bluesite[8] = 'a number of Fortune 500 companies' bluesite[9] = 'a toxic waste dump' bluesite[10] = 'a maximum-security prison' * bluecity is more where bluecity = array('10') bluecity[1] = ' on Three Mile Island' bluecity[2] = ' in Armonk, N.Y.' bluecity[3] = ' just above Boulder, Colo.' bluecity[4] = ' in midtown Manhattan' bluecity[5] = ' in beautiful downtown Burbank' bluecity[6] = ' near Fargo, N.D.' bluecity[7] = ' in the suburbs of Metetse, Wyo.' bluecity[8] = ' in the Silicon Valley' bluecity[9] = " between Cassini's Division and the Roche Limit" bluecity[10] = ', formerly in Boca Raton until the company learned ' + 'that "Boca Raton" means "Rat Mouth" in Spanish' morestuff = array('5') morestuff[1] = 'further explanation' morestuff[2] = 'detailed announcement' morestuff[3] = 'specific details' morestuff[4] = 'public statement' morestuff[5] = 'voluntary confession' sayblue = array('7') sayblue[1] = 'would be premature at this point in time' sayblue[2] = 'would cause smaller companies to file for Chapter 11,' + ' which would just get us in trouble again with the Antitrust Division' + ' of the Justice Department' sayblue[3] = 'would cost me my pension' sayblue[4] = 'might give clone-makers information they should' + ' not have access to' sayblue[5] = 'could get me transferred to Anchorage' sayblue[6] = 'will have to come from the M*A*S*H cast' sayblue[7] = 'must come from a more authoritative source' bytehead = array('8') bytehead[1] = 'observers' bytehead[2] = 'analysts' bytehead[3] = 'watchers' bytehead[4] = 'spies' bytehead[5] = 'followers' bytehead[6] = 'observers' bytehead[7] = 'analysts' bytehead[8] = 'observers' goodsay = array('10') goodsay[1] = 'the greatest thing since sliced bread' goodsay[2] = 'something the industry has long needed' goodsay[3] = 'an important and significant advancement' goodsay[4] = 'one of the finest achievements of western civilization' goodsay[5] = 'a seminal step, pregnant with fertile possibilities' goodsay[6] = 'the best improvement since they quit using punch cards' goodsay[7] = 'the reason why Big Blue continues to lead the way' goodsay[8] = 'a colossal advancement in personal-computing power' goodsay[9] = 'another reason why no one ever got fired for buying IBM' goodsay[10] = 'the first manifestation of the next generation of perso nal computers' goodmore = array('10') goodmore[1] = 'represents no major breakthrough' goodmore[2] = 'contains no surprises' goodmore[3] = 'employs an unusual huge interface known as the capybara ' goodmore[4] = 'requires an an EE to configure' goodmore[5] = 'uses components yet to be invented' goodmore[6] = 'will work only with IBM peripherals' goodmore[7] = 'requires a three-phase 37-hz 440-volt power supply' goodmore[8] = 'blows up if connected to anything from a different manu facturer' goodmore[9] = 'is compatible with Sidekick' goodmore[10] = 'crashes at the slightest provocation' butmore = array('9') butmore[1] = 'set a standard' butmore[2] = 'be popular with MIS professionals' butmore[3] = 'be what Lotus is to spreadsheets' butmore[4] = 'move us into the next generation' butmore[5] = 'give the other companies something to try to emulate' butmore[6] = 'give the clone-makers fits for at least two months' butmore[7] = 'carry on the tradition of reliability and service' butmore[8] = "give Radar O'Reilly something besides a teddy bear to sl eep with" butmore[9] = 'require substantial additional purchases by users,' + ' thus making IBM stock a good buy' badsay = array('10') badsay[1] = 'William Gates, president of MicroSoft,' badsay[2] = 'Phillipe Kahn of Borland International' badsay[3] = 'Mitch Kaypor, formerly of Lotus Development Corp.,' badsay[4] = 'Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple,' badsay[5] = 'Gary Kildall, developer of CP/M,' badsay[6] = 'Adam Osborne at Paperback Software' badsay[7] = 'Bob Wallace, president of QuickSoft,' badsay[8] = 'Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0,' badsay[9] = 'Charles Babbage, conceptual founder of computing,' badsay[10] = 'Lee Felsenstein, president of Golemics and designer of t he Osborne I,' notgood = array('10') notgood[1] = 'a disaster waiting to happen' notgood[2] = 'a solution in search of a problem' notgood[3] = 'another chiclet-key PC Jr.' notgood[4] = "Big Blue's biggest blunder since the RISC machine" notgood[5] = 'as big a step backwards as returning to paper tape stora ge' notgood[6] = 'a titanic company finally hitting an iceberg' notgood[7] = "the kind of thing you'd expect from some hackers" + " in a garage, not from the world's biggest computer company" notgood[8] = 'something that only defense contractors could afford' notgood[9] = 'too much, too soon' notgood[10] = 'the DP equivalent of herpes' addbad = array('10') addbad[1] = 'Only IBM would try getting away with this' addbad[2] = 'It will go over like a pregnant pole-vaulter' addbad[3] = 'In two years, it will be as popular as ferrite core memor y' addbad[4] = 'You can bet nobody will try to clone this one' addbad[5] = 'There are people starving on this planet, ' + "and yet we have expensive products like this. That's disgusting" addbad[6] = "They must be relying on the old saying " + "that there's one born every minute" addbad[7] = "I've heard it runs slower than a dBASE sort" addbad[8] = 'Maybe they developed it for the Strategic Defense' + " Initiative. That's the only way it makes sense" addbad[9] = "Perhaps it's only a stopgap until OS/2 is debugged" addbad[10] = 'Only Big Blue would dare try anything like this' catname = array('2') catname[1] = 'Mark Emmer, publisher' catname[2] = 'Ed Quillen, editor' goodadj = array('10') goodadj[1] = 'influential' goodadj[2] = 'respected' goodadj[3] = 'esteemed' goodadj[4] = 'highly regarded' goodadj[5] = 'popular' goodadj[6] = 'noted' goodadj[7] = "insiders'" goodadj[8] = 'revered' goodadj[9] = 'powerful' goodadj[10] = 'innovative' badwarn = array('7') badwarn[1] = "All these reports have about as much credibility " + "as a White House spokesman" badwarn[2] = "If these statements could be transformed into " + "matter, we could go into the fertilizer business" badwarn[3] = "If you believe any of this, come and see me. " + "I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you" badwarn[4] = "Such speculation just proves the truth of the " + "old saying, 'Garbage in, Garbage out'" badwarn[5] = "This baseless gossip ought to contain a " + "self-referential disclaimer" badwarn[6] = "Utter fabrications like this ought to be an " + "embarrassment to everyone involved. Unfortunately, some people " + "persist in circulating them" badwarn[7] = "The circulation of such groundless rumors " + "represents as good a reason as any for joining Ed Meese " + "in his campaign to repeal the First Amendment" * Define formatting functions define('justify(s)f,g,h,t') :(justify_end) justify s len(79) . f = :f(justify_2) g = reverse(f) g break(' -') . h = t = t reverse(g) char(13) char(10) s = reverse(h) s :(justify) justify_2 justify = t s :(return) justify_end * * output(.out,10,,'d:insider.sav') * x = save(10) :f(bad_file) * ident(x) :s(end) * Save it here * Seed the random generator date() len(8) . today len(4) len(2) . s1 len(1) len(2) . s2 + len(1) len(2) . s3 date len(2) . s4 len(1) len(2) . s5 seed = chop((s1 s2 s3) / 2) + (s4 s5) * Define random function *----------------------------------------------- RANDOM define('random(n)') ran_var = seed :(random_end) random ran_var = remdr(ran_var * 4676., 414971.) random = ran_var / 414971. random = ne(n,0) convert(random * n,'integer') + 1 :(return) random_end *---------------------------------------------------------------- getvar boyblue = blueboy[random(10)] speaknew = newspeak[random(10)] sayhear = hearsay[random(10)] stuffnew = newstuff[random(10)] whatsay = saywhat[random(10)] siteblue = bluesite[random(10)] cityblue = bluecity[random(10)] stuffmore = morestuff[random(5)] bluesay = sayblue[random(7)] headbyte = bytehead[random(8)] saygood = goodsay[random(10)] moregood = goodmore[random(10)] morebut = butmore[random(9)] saybad = badsay[random(10)] goodnot = notgood[random(10)] badadd = addbad[random(10)] namecat = catname[random(2)] adjgood = goodadj[random(10)] warnbad = badwarn[random(7)] graf1 = ' An IBM ' boyblue ' has ' speaknew ' ' sayhear + " that the company's next personal-computer " stuffnew + ' would ' whatsay '. The ' boyblue ', who asked that his name ' + 'not be used, did say that the ' stuffnew ' was under development at ' + siteblue cityblue ', but that any ' stuffmore ' "' bluesay '."' graf2 = ' Industry ' headbyte "' reactions were generally " + 'favorable, with many calling the ' stuffnew ' "' saygood '." ' + 'Technically, the new product "' moregood '," one said, "but it will ' + morebut '."' graf3 = ' However, there were some dissenters. ' + saybad ' said it represented "' goodnot '," adding that "' + badadd '."' graf4 = ' ' namecat ' of the ' adjgood ' newsletter, ' + "A SNOBOL's Chance, cautioned that " '"' warnbad '."' top = dupl(' ',15) "SPECIAL CATSPAW INSIDERS' REPORT FOR " today output(.output,6,5000) output = top output = justify(graf1) output = justify(graf2) output = justify(graf3) output = justify(graf4) end From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 22 July 1987, 16:48:32 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 132 (132) Conference on TEACHING COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES COURSES Sponsored by The Association for Computers and the Humanities JUNE 9-11, 1988 OBERLIN COLLEGE OBERLIN, OHIO C A L L F O R P A P E R S The Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference on Teaching Computers and the Humanities Courses is intended for faculty who are offering or developing courses meant to teach humanities students--in literature, language, history, philosophy, art, music--about computer use within their disciplines. The conference will NOT address the teaching of humanities subjects via the computer (computer assisted instruction, CAI). Its focus is courses designed to teach humanists how computers are used, and may be used in the future, as a tool within their disciplines. The conference is also centrally concerned with teaching computing skills to humanities students and faculty. Among the questions to be addressed are: What should be included in such courses? How should they be taught? What level and mix of students should take the course? Should a higher-level programming language be taught? If so, which language is most suitable? Should computing skills be taught before or after the student is familiar with applications of computers within his or her field? Which applictions software should be taught? In how much detail? Papers and proposals for panels on these questions and directly related questions are invited for presentation at the conference. While summaries of existing courses will not be excluded from the conference, we are looking in particular for substantive discussion of the issues surrounding the teaching of courses on computers and the humanities. Please submit five copies of abstracts and panel proposals before 30 November 1987. Abstracts for both papers and panels should be approximately 1000 words long. Panel proposals should include a tentative list of participants. The Program Committee will notify authors regarding acceptance by 31 January 1988. Full papers will be due by 15 May 1988. Selected papers from the conference will be published in a proceedings volume. Please send all abstracts and inquiries to: Professor Robert S. Tannenbaum, Chairman, Program Committee ACH Conference on Teaching Computers and the Humanities Courses Department of Computer Science Hunter College CUNY 695 Park Avenue New York, N.Y. 10021 Inquiries, abstracts, and proposals may also be sent via electronic mail to RSTHC@CUNYVM (Bitnet). From: Willard McCarty IDE@VASSAR Subject: An invitation from Nancy IdePROGRAMMING FOR HUMANISTS/ARTS STUDENTS Date: 22 July 1987, 16:59:27 EDT21 JUL 87 12:14-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 133 (133) I have sent around a copy of the call-for-papers for a conference which the Association for Computers and the Humanities will sponsor next summer on Teaching Computers and the Humanities Courses. This conferecen grows out of a workshop on the topic held at Vassar College last summer. I am interested in organizing a panel or preferably a whole session on the issue of the need and/or value of teaching programming to humanities and arts students. As some of you may know I have long argued that humanities students who intend to use computers in their work should learn to program, for a variety of reasons, many of which have been reiterated in discussions among this group recently. Therefore I am asking those of you who hold a view on this topic to let me know if you would be interested in partcipating in the session at the Oberlin conference. I want to hear from those who favor programmiong as well as from those who do not. Contact me as IDE@VASSAR (Bitnet) if you are interested in the session or in the conference itself. Nancy Ide ide@vassar From: JMBHC@CUNYVM Subject: Vapographies Date: Wed, 22 Jul 87 17:19 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 134 (134) Didn't receive vaporgraphies here. By the way, is it too late to add mine? Joanne Badagliacco From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 22 July 1987, 19:30:24 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 135 (135) Copies of HUMANIST BIOGRAFY or of the identical but divided HUMBIOS 1, 2, and 3 should have reached all of you by now. For technically interesting reasons we now seem to understand, we had great trouble getting the biographies to HUMANISTs in the UK but have finally succeeded. Anyone who has not received a copy should write to me directly (not through HUMANIST, please) as soon as is convenient. Either an "anthropomorphic peripheral interface error" or some electronic slip-up could be responsible. I will likely be sending out the first supplement to the biographies in late August. I think it's important for as many of us to be represented to each other in this way as possible; no one, no matter how lowly or exalted in knowledge or in status should feel excluded. Building a professional identity will be much more intelligently and effectively done if your contribution is included. Thanks for your help and patience. From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Broken record? Date: Thu, 23 Jul 87 00:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 136 (136) Just read the call for papers for the Oberlin meeting on HUMANIST. Can hardly believe that the same phraseology, the same issues, are being put forward here as for the Vassar conference last summer. Has ASTHC fallen into an endless loop? Is humanistic computing condemned to be the only kind that is currently advancing in a geological timewarp, while others rush merrily past in all sorts of interesting directions? Or am I missing some important byproduct of such slowly grinding millstones? If so, could someone please enlighten me? Am particularly curious about why there is so little interest in teaching HUMANITIES courses about what COMPUTERS are and how they impact on human culture and human nature. I would have thought that was at least as interesting to humanists as the pros and cons of Basic versus Pascal for use in the "discipline". Why do I keep thinking of Humanities not as a discipline, but as the proper study of mankind...??? From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: A query re Oberlin COnference of ASTHC,from a Fox among the Hedgehogs?? Date: Thu, 23 Jul 87 00:13 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 137 (137) Just read the call for papers for the Oberlin meeting on HUMANIST. Can hardly believe that the same phraseology, the same issues, are being put forward here as for the Vassar conference last summer. Has ASTHC fallen into an endless loop? Is humanistic computing condemned to be the only kind that is currently advancing in a geological timewarp, while others rush merrily past in all sorts of interesting directions? Or am I missing some important byproduct of such slowly grinding millstones? If so, could someone please enlighten me? Am particularly curious about why there is so little interest in teaching HUMANITIES courses about what COMPUTERS are and how they impact on human culture and human nature. I would have thought that was at least as interesting to humanists as the pros and cons of Basic versus Pascal for use in the "discipline". Why do I keep thinking of Humanities not as a discipline, but as the proper study of mankind...??? From: Willard McCarty Subject: Joel Goldfield on the Oberlin Conference Date: 23 July 1987, 20:07:26 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 138 (138) >Date: Thu, 23 Jul 87 10:32:21 edt >From: jdg%psc90.UUCP@DARTMOUTH.EDU (Dr. Joel Goldfield) >Message-Id: <8707231432.AA03398@psc90.UUCP> >To: ihnp4!princeton!seismo!HUMANIST@utoronto > >Dear Colleagues, > I think our "guest" writer may have a point about an "endless loop." >This is not a rhetorical statement, however. We might ask our sponsoring >colleagues to define the goals of the Oberlin conference more specifically. >Might this be more a framework for process, for discussion, than for some >specific conclusions. Do the participants from last year's conference at >Vassar, which I also attended, feel that we no longer need mass discussions >on the topics Nancy Ide is suggesting? > Let's try to observe Willard's suggestion that identification of >the writer appear in the body of each HUMANIST message. Who is "Guest4"? > > Regards, > Joel D. Goldfield > Plymouth State College (NH, USA) From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: ID Date: Fri, 24 Jul 87 00:52 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 139 (139) I appreciate Goldfield's reply, and apologize for being too bashful in my maiden entry to insert more precise identification. Am eager to stand corrected, but my impression is that the topics outlined for Oberlin are almost WORD for WORD the same as those targeted at Vassar. The question is not whether discussion is no longer needed, but whether there is anything else to be discussed -- or so it seems to Sterling Beckwith York University (ON, CDN) From: SRRJ1%UK.AC.YORK.VAXB@AC.UK Subject: Date: 24-JUL-1987 16:10:24 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 140 (140) COMPUTING FOR THE HUMANITIES? Perhaps HUMANISTS could help us as we develop a campaign for the provision of special resources for computing in the humanities here in York [U.K] - currently there are none. We are now starting to devise ways of introducing data-processing techniques to History students and staff and in making our case to the "authorities" it would be useful to draw on your collective experience. We have an excellent computing service, but the staff are already over-worked and are also a little nervous about us because they are all from science backgrounds. We get on well but do we always understand each others needs? What we would like to knowis - outside the special schemes funded by the UGC (in Britain) and various computer companies - how have others found it possible to make a case for specialist computing advice in the humanities, or should we in any case simply be looking for more specialists in specific applications (database design, programing, text-processing etc) regardless of discipline? In putting together our case we're trying to collect as much information as possible about what goes on elsewhere. If you've time we'd find it very helpful to know 1] What provision is made for computing in the humanities in your institution? 2] How do you justify the provision of such specialist services to the humanities? 3]If you were starting from scratch again, what are the mistakes you'd most like to avoid repeating? Thanks for your time....we look forward to hearing from you! Sarah Rees Joneset al. History Department, Vanbrugh College, University of York, U.K. From: IDE@VASSAR Subject: Oberlin conference Date: Fri, 24-JUL-1987 11:40 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 141 (141) The point is well taken that some of the issues proposed for discussion at the Oberlin conference are the same as those that were discussed at Vassar last year. For this reason I made slight revisions in the call which I hope broaden the scope somewhat. However, my impression at the Vassar conference was that more questions were raised than answered. It may be true that the programming issue has been beaten to a pulp (although a recent re-hashing of that issue on HUMANIST led me to believe that a lot of people had not yet heard it or felt it resolved ssatisfactorily). However, we have not answered such questions as: what exactly is it that we think that humanities students need to learn about computers? Skills only? or more about methodology and approach, as well as conceptual material concerning computers and computing? (The programming issue speaks to this larger concern, since most people who want to teach programming want to do so in order to provide a solid understanding of computers and problem solving techniques than specific programming skills. So a better question vis a vis programming is: what do we intend to teach when we teach programming? and how is this best accomplished?) Can we expect students to understand how computers and computing fit into research in the humanities, given a course on COMPUTING intended for humanities students (as opposed to a course on COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES, which would focus on both more squarely)? Or is it necessary for us to teach the methodology that computers enable us to implement? More broadly, there were two kinds of courses described at the Vassar workshop: skills- oriented courses and courses which were more concerned with methodology and developing problem solving skills in general by using computer applications to show how these things are implemented. Which is better? Is one better than the other for certain contexts? As for implementation, I saw almost no answers to these questions: do we need separate C&H courses or can we integrate materials into existing humanities courses? If not, why not? Why don't existing computer science courses serve the needs of humanities students for some aspects of C&H? Do we think all humanities students need some exposure to computer use for humanities research or should we let our students be self-selected? Can whatever we decide must be taught be done in a single c&H course? In one or more humanities courses? In some mix of special C&H courses, humanities courses with a computing component, and/or computer science courses? Other concerns: what are the realities of establishing a C&H course or even integrating computing materials into existing humanities courses with regard to adminstrative red tape? Do we need specialized faculty? What level of hardware support is required to effectively teach such a course? Should labs be defintitely included and if so, what shape should they take (specific tasks to be completed within the lab or just question and answer, etc.)? Does a minor, joint major, and/or double major in computers and the humanities make sense and if so, what is the focus and intent of such a program? I shouldn't say I saw not answers to these questions at Vassar, since some of these topics were discussed quite thoroughly; instead, I saw no resolution of the questions. I do think the point about the programming issue is well taken, and so I would like to redefine the topic I propose for a panel or session at Oberlin. I would like to address the following question: Assuming a course or courses in C&H at the undergraduate level, what is it that we feel studnets who have taken such courses should know when they complete the course? If anyone has any ideas about other issues that should be raised at the Oberlin conference, PLEASE let me know. We are open to suggestions (hopefully the call was not worded to seem to disallow consideration of questions other than those we listed) and would in fact welcome them. Or, do we know all we need to know about C&H courses, therefore making such a conference irrelevant? Nancy Ide ide@vassar From: Willard McCarty Subject: A Summary of Things Said So Far Date: 26 July 1987, 20:25:30 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 142 (142) I have been asked to prepare for the Newsletter of the ACH a concise summary of the discussions on HUMANIST since it began in May. Looking over my file of contributions, I find that more has happened than I would have guessed, but because some of the interesting stuff may have been sent only to individuals, I need help in making this summary. Would anyone with interesting private contributions send them to me right away? Because HUMANIST is necessarily like the "longish conversation" described by the poet David Jones ("where one thing leads to another; but should a third party hear fragments of it, he might not know how the talk had passed from the cultivation of cabbages to Melchizedek, king of Salem"), summaries of this kind seem important for us HUMANISTs as well as for others. One day we may have a expense-free conferencing system available world-wide. Until then, the occasional summary seems to me a particularly necessary thing. I would appreciate receiving anyone's thoughts or suggestions on this matter. From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Oberlin Conference agenda and the Call for Answers Date: Mon, 27 Jul 87 00:22 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 143 (143) Obviously my perception of humanism is seriously defective. I actually ENJOY conferences where there are more questions raised than definitive answers provided. (Perhaps this is just a throwback to the pre_Rabenite days of the not-yet-computerized humanities -- if so, please forgive it.) Particularly when the questions are about teaching and learning, which seems to (or used tom when Mary McCarthy was in school) involve large amounts of actual TRIAL and ERROR by all concerned. THe announcement I read was about as open to other dimensions and other questions than those promulgated at Vassar as the National Security Council was to supplying the Sandinistas with humanitarian aid. Not knowing anything about how ACH runs its affairs, I can hardly comment further, but will eagerly await any further crosstalk on HUMANIST. Sterling Beckwith, York University From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: Oberlin Conference rhubarb Date: Mon, 27 Jul 87 11:14:46 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 144 (144) The recent discussion prompted by Sterling Beckwith of York Univ. raises some interesting questions beyond the obvious ones (who is ASTHC? who on earth has ever suggested teaching Basic to humanists, and can we get them some professional help before they do further harm to themselves or others? what is the difference between a study and a discipline, and is a study any good to anyone if undisciplined?). I confess to some confusion on two grounds: why, to people who spend their professional lives re-examining texts and issues that have already occupied decades or centuries of attention, often by the brightest minds of their times, should it seem regrettable, or a sign of being caught in a "geological timewarp", or even odd, to be discussing, this summer, questions that occupied the attention of some people last summer? Apart from pedagogical issues (and let's thank God for humanists who want to address and discuss pedagogical issues directly and explicitly!) the Vassar and Oberlin conferences are, after all, raising fairly substantial questions of what it is we want our students to learn, the nature of the world into which we are sending them, and the relationship both of technology and (more fundamentally) the algorithmic approach to problem-solving. It does not surprise me, and it astonishes me that it should surprise anyone, to see these issues still the topic of conferences and discussions. They will necessarily continue to be so until there is either some more visible consensus, or until everyone's mind is made up and we agree to disagree, or until the nature of the problem is radically changed by developments in our secondary schools. I don't expect to see any of these events in the next few years. True, at Vassar there did seem to be some common assumptions and approaches beneath the wide surface divergences, and I tried at the end of the conference to make those common assumptions explicit. But apart from the fact that not everyone was convinced, those common assumptions remain only the outline of a potential consensus, not the content of an actual consensus, until we are all aware of our shared assumptions. In the meantime, there remains a lot of room for discussion of the issues named in the Oberlin prospectus, including choice of programming language, or other command medium. Proponents of utility naturally suggest Snobol or occasionally Prolog as the language of choice; others, who argue that the point of teaching programming is to show the student more about how the machine itself works, suggest that a more cleanly procedural language like Pascal should be used. (And we know from this list that some have even tried to bridge the two language classes by teaching Icon, with, however, disappointing results.) It is significant, I think, that the former are often interested *primarily* in enabling students to write programs for their own use, often teaching advanced undergraduate or graduate students, and take routine scholarly inquiry as their context, while the latter tend to emphasize the logical structure of computer programming, teach undergraduates, and focus *primarily* on understanding the machine as an end in itself or to broaden horizons, rather than as a tool to help get quick and dirty solutions. I cannot think that this debate is unrelated to "teaching HUMANITIES courses about what COMPUTERS are and how they impact on human culture and human nature." As for courses that explicitly address the social and cultural impact of computing -- I agree they are important, but I don't see any great shortage of them. Nor do I see -- and this is my second point of confusion -- how we expect to conduct useful discussions of computers, what they are, and how they may affect human nature and culture, without arranging to give at least some of our students some concrete knowledge of what happens in the CPU. Many social issues (privacy, organizational efficiency, and so on) may well be addressable without any programming knowledge. I daresay the sociologists are addressing them; I don't see that my training in literature calls me to try to address them, too. And the interesting questions that do seem to belong in the humanists' bailiwick (computers-and-human-creativity, computers- and-human-dignity, can-computers-ever-think, ...) seem to me to require some knowledge both of computing and of the humanities. To take a simple example: Weizenbaum's 'Eliza' program and its 'Doctor' script can lead to far-ranging discussion of profound social and personal issues. But from the relevant chapter in Weizenbaum's book we can see how catastrophically the discussion can go awry when no one can understand a word the others are saying. Weizenbaum does not seem to have understood what the psychoanalysts were talking about, and they clearly were incapable of following his argument -- largely, I think, owing to their technical naivete. They could not see how the program worked, and he could not show them. Any course on the impact of computers on society risks exactly the same difficulties if the students don't have any pragmatic computing skills. --- Since I began this note, there have been a number of further exchanges on this issue, and I have acquired a third point of confusion: why, if one prefers conferences at which more questions are raised than answered, should one complain in the first place that the same issues are going to occupy the time of another conference, worry about "broken records", and imply that no one else in computing spends any time worrying about the same issues from one year to the next? Perhaps there were multiple versions of the announcement, and Canadians got a different one, but I certainly do not see what Sterling Beckwith is talking about when he says the Oberlin announcement was not open to the issues he seems to want to raise. "What should be included in such courses?" is explicitly listed as a topic, as are "directly related" questions and any "substantive discussion of the issues surrounding the teaching of courses on computers and the humanities." It would take casuistry worthy of Ignatius Loyola to say that this call for papers excludes the issues raised by Sterling Beckwith. I will note in closing that Joe Raben deserves better than to be accused implicitly of not being a "real humanist." It would disappoint me to hear this discussion continue on that kind of note. Michael Sperberg-McQueen University of Illinois / Chicago From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 27 July 1987, 20:42:40 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 145 (145) The following observation on the latest bit of discussion was sent to me privately. I've removed the name of the sender so as not to offend a good friend and pass it on to you for your amusement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Humanist is fascinating! I had no idea people could get so worked up over a call for papers. As far as I can tell, conference topics seem to follow a sort of cyclic movement in any given field: they're all very similar for a few years, then what's "in" changes, and a new cycle starts. In medieval studies lately it's been women, monks, or mysticism or a combination of the above. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Call for Papers: RIAO 88 Date: 27 July 1987, 21:02:25 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 146 (146) CALL FOR PAPERS RIAO 88 USER-ORIENTED CONTENT-BASED TEXT AND IMAGE HANDLING Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA March 21-24, 1988 Conference organized by: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Centre National de Recherche des Telecommunications (CNET) Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaires (CID) US participating organizations: American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) American Society for Information Science (ASIS) Information Industry Association (IIA) This conference is prepared under the direction of: Professor Andre Lichnerowicz de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris and Professor Jacques Arsac correspondant de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris A GENERAL INTRODUCTION: RIAO 88 is being held to demonstrate the state of the art in information retrieval, a domain that is in rapid evolution because of developments in the technology for machine control of full-text and image databases. This evolution is stimulated by the demands of end-users generated by the recent availability of CD-ROM full text publishing and general public access to information data bases. A group of French organizations has taken the initiative of preparing this conference. Its wish in promoting this forum is not only to stimulate and challenge researchers from all nations but also to increase an awareness of European technology. This "call for papers" is beeing distributed world-wide. We want to reach individuals in the research communities throughout the university and industrial sectors. The conference will be held in Cambridge, MA. We hope that it will encourage the exchange of European and American viewpoints, and establish new links between research teams in United-states and Europe. CALL FOR PAPERS General theme Full-text and mixed media database systems are characterized by the fact that the structure of the information is not known a priori. This prevents advance knowledge of the types of questions that will be asked, unlike the situation found in hierarchical and relational database management systems. You are invited to submit a paper showing how the situation can be dealt with. Special attention will be given to: - techniques designed to reduce imprecision in full-text database searching; - data entry and control; - "friendly" end-user interfaces. - new media A large number of specific subjects can be treated within this general framework. Some suggestions are made in the following section. Specific themes A) Linguistic processing and interrogation of full text databases: - automatic indexing, - machine generated summaries, - natural language queries, - computer-aided translation, - multilingual interfaces. B) Automatic thesaurus construction, C) Expert system techniques for retrieving information in full-text and multimedia databases: - expert systems reasoning on open-ended domains - expert systems simulating librarians accessing pertinent information. D) Friendly user interfaces to classical information retrieval systems. E) Specialized machines and system architectures designed for treating full-text data, including managing and accessing widely distributed databases. F) Automatic database construction scanning techniques, optical character readers, output document preparation, etc... G) New applications and perspectives suggested by emerging new technologies: - optical storage techniques (videodisk, CD-ROM, CD-I, Digital Optical Disks); - integrated text, sound and image retrieval systems; - electronic mail and document delivery based on content; - voice processing technologies for database construction; - production of intelligent tutoring systems; - hypertext, hypermedia. Conditions for participation The program committee is looking for communications geared toward practical applications. Papers which have not been validated by a working model, a prototype or a simulation, or for which a realization of such a model seems currently unlikely, may be refused. Authors must submit a paper of about 10 pages doubled spaced, and a 100 word abstract. Four copies must be sent before October 30 to one of these two addresses: - RIAO 88, Conference Service Office, MIT, Bldg 7, Room 111 CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139 - RIAO 88, CID, 36 bis rue Ballu, 75009 PARIS FRANCE Each presentation will last 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion and questions. Arrangement have been made with the international journal "Information Processing and Management" for publishing expanded versions of some papers. High quality audiovisual techniques should be used when presenting the paper. Separate demonstration sessions can be scheduled if requested. Particular attention will be paid to : - the use of readily available equipment for demonstrations (IBM PC, APPLE, network connec- tions...); - pre-recorded video or floppy disk displays. Hardcopy printouts of results should be avoided if possible. English is the working language of the conference. For further information call: in North America : Karen Daifuku, ------- PROGRAM COMMITTEE French co-chairman US co-chairman Prof. Christian FLUHR Dr. Donald WALKER Universite Paris XI/INSTN BELL Communications Research J.C. Bassano (F) Universite d'Orleans A. Bookstein (USA) University of Chicago J. Bing (N) Norwegian research Center for Comp. and law E. Black (USA) T.J. Watson IBM Research Center C. Boitet (F) Universite de Grenoble J. Boucher (CAN) Universite de Montreal C. Chen (USA) Simmons College Y. Choueka (Israel) Bar-Ilan University C. Ciampi (I) Instituto per la Doc. jiuridica X. Dalloz (F) Centre National de la Cinematographie T. Doszkocs (USA) National Library of Medecine E. Fox (USA) Virginia Polytechnic Institute E. Garcia Camarero (SP) Universitad Complutense de Madrid C. Goldstein (USA) National Library of Medecine G. Grefenstette (F) Universite de Tours H. Hjerppe (S) University of Link%oping D. Kayser (F) Universite Paris XIII P. Kirstein (UK) University College of London R. Marcus (USA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology P. Mordini (F) Ecole des Mines de Paris C. D. Paice (UK) University of Lancaster A. S. Pollitt (UK) The Polytechnic Queensgate Uddersfield F. Rabitti (I) Instituto dei Elabor. della Informazione J. Rohmer (F) Bull, Louveciennes G. Sabah (F) LIMSI(CNRS) Orsay T. Saracevic (USA) Rutgers University W. Turner (F) CDST (CNRS) Paris H. J. Schneider (FRG) Technische Universit%at Berlin C. Schwartz (FRG) Siemens M%unchen assisted by a Technical and an Organisation Committee. APPLICATION FORM TITLE/POSITION:................................................................. ................... I plan to attend the conference, please send me the program: YES NO I plan to present a paper: YES NO Conference theme (circle one): A B C D E F G Title of the communication: Are you willing to present a demonstration of your prototype? YES NO Equipment needed: Please mail this form before Septembre 15, 1987 to: RIAO 88 Conference Service Office MIT Bldg 7, Room 111 CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139 USA From: Willard McCarty Subject: Call for Participation: Hypertext 87 & ACM SIGIR Date: 27 July 1987, 21:07:18 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 147 (147) HYPERTEXT 87 WORKSHOP ON SYSTEMS, APPLICATIONS, AND ISSUES November 13-15, 1987 Chapel Hill, North Carolina Sponsored by ACM, IEEE, U. of North Carolina, ONR, MCC, NSF Hypertext is an approach to information management in which data is stored in a network of nodes connected by links. Nodes can contain text, source code, graphics, audio, video, or other forms of data, and are meant to be viewed and manipulated interactively. Hypertext systems support collaboration and cooperation among users in a wide varieties of activities, ranging from medical instruction to software development. Hypertext has come of age. An increasing number of hypertext systems and applications have been built and used within the last few years. This Workshop will be the first opportunity for implementors, application builders, and users of hypertext systems to come together to share information and ideas. Suggested Topics The workshop will focus equally on implementations of hypertext systems, applications of hypertext, and issues surrounding the use of hypertext. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to, the following: Implementations and technical issues - abstract machines and base engines - complete systems - user interfaces - multi-media support - distributed systems - query and search - storage management Applications and experiences - Computer-aided engineering (CASE, CAEE, ...) - Authoring and technical documentation - Medical and legal information management - Electronic encyclopedias - Interactive tools for education and museums - Information analysis and knowledge acquisition - Scholar's workbenches for the humanties and social sciences Issues surrounding use of hypertext - Cognitive aspects of using and designing hypertext systems - Strategies for effective use of hypertext - Supporting collaborative work - Managing complexity in large information networks - Legal issues (copyrights, royalties, ...) - Social implications Information for participants: Papers are invited for presentation at the Workshop and subsequent publication in proceedings. Papers should be limited to 20 pages, and 5 copies should be submitted to the following address: Hypertext 87 Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Attendance at the workshop will be limited. Prospective participants not submitting a paper should submit a brief (1-2 page) position paper describing their activities or interests in hypertext. Important dates: 8/1/87 Submission of papers (Both position papers and presentations) 9/15/87 Notice of acceptance for full papers 9/15/87 Notice of admission to the Workshop 10/5/87 Camera-ready copy of papers for preprints Planing Committee: Frank Halasz, MCC, (Workshop Co-chair) Mayer Schwartz, Tektronix, (Program Co-chair) John B. Smith, UNC, (Workshop Co-chair) Nicole Yankelovich, Brown Univ. (Publications Chair) Local Arrangements Committee: David V. Beard, UNC, (Arrangements Chair) James M. Coggins, UNC, (Workshop Manager) Leigh Pittman, (Workshop Coordinator), Program Committee: Mayer Schwartz, Tektronix, Program Co-chair Stephen F. Weiss, UNC, Program Co-chair Greg Crane, Harvard University Norman Delisle, Tektronix Mark Frisse, Washington Univ. Med. School Frank Halasz, MCC David Lowe, NYU Norm Meyrowitz, Brown Univ. Theodore Nelson, Project Xanadu Walter Scacchi, USC John B. Smith, UNC Lucy Suchman, Xerox Parc Randy Trigg, Xerox PARC Andries van Dam, Brown Univ. Stephen A. Weyer, Apple Computer Nicole Yankelovich, Brown Univ. For more information contact: John B. Smith, 919-962-5021, jbs@cs.unc.edu Frank Halasz, 512-338-3648, halasz@mcc, seismo!ut-sally!im4u!milano!halasz From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Off to Oberlin, or ONe Man's Discipline is Another's Pornography Date: Tue, 28 Jul 87 01:03 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 148 (148) Here is the best commentary I could find on the now-famous Oberlin Proclamation. Strangely enough, my trusty humanistic computer counted few if any instances of the words "answers", "consensus", or "humanities student" in this parallel (but oh so interesting) proposal by our transatlantic cousins. And perhaps, where diachronic change and synchronic diversity of viewpoint or style in such matters are themselves seen as fit subjects for humanistic discussion, there might be less need for defensiveness about who is or is not a "true" believer. Other, better qualified students of comparative literature or computer linguistics will no doubt find further textual comparison of the two "calls" edifying, even if they choose to ignore the lingering echoes of Last Year at Poughkeepsie... --------------- PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS CATH 88: Computers and Teaching in the Humanities: Re-defining the Humanities? Following on the highly successful conference on Computers and Teaching in the Humanities (CATH 87) held at Southampton in April 1987, a second conference is planned to take place on 13, 14 and 15 December 1988. The emphasis will be on academic issues related to the introduction of computing into academic courses in the humanities in higher education. The main part of the conference will be devoted to workshops and seminar sessions. There will also be opportunities for informal demonstrations and poster sessions. The conference will focus on the interface between the computer and Humanities disciplines. To what extent are the traditional assumptions and methods of each discipline being either supported or challenged by the use of new technologies in higher education? The computer may facilitate existing methods, making our practice more effective. Alternatively, the computer may be changing our conceptions about a discipline, pointing to new theoretical models and new ways of teaching. In some Humanities departments there is now a tension between established and computer-based methods. Does such a tension mark the coming birth of new, technology-based Humanities subjects? If so, what are the implications for the traditional commitments of teachers in the Humanities? Will the relationship between research and teaching change, and if so, in what ways? And how will students in the future acquire the values and methods appropriate to their subjects? These, and related issues, will be examined in workshop sessions on specific fields, such as English or Music, assessing the extent to which these disciplines are changing, or are likely to change under the impact of new technologies. Other sessions will examine themes common to several disciplines, such as the shift in learning methods, the potential of expert system methods for mapping the theoretical constructs of Humanities subjects, the use of simulation as a teaching tool, and so on. In addition, the conference will analyse the political and institutional context for new developments in the Humanities, looking at policies for supporting and funding computer-related teaching. The workshop and seminar sessions, which will form the main part of the conference will focus on the discussion of educational issues, rather than detailed descriptions of courses, or particular computer-based tools. There will be opportunities for discussing or demonstrating these in separate, parallel sessions. Proposals are invited for contributions to the workshop sessions. Abstracts of about 500 words should be sent, NOT LATER THAN 15 JANUARY 1988, to Dr May Katzen Office for Humanities Communication University of Leicester LEICESTER LE1 7RH These proposals will be considered by a Programme Committee, who will notify the outcome to those involved by 15 April 1988, and plan a detailed programme accordingly. A selection will be made from the abstracts submitted to provide the basis of a forthcoming book on the theme of the conference, and invitations to contribute chapters will be issued by the Editorial Board. Proposals for demonstrations and poster sessions will also be welcomed and should be sent to the address above by 15 May 1988. Anyone wishing to be put on the mailing list for future information should also write to that address. From: A_BODDINGTON%UK.AC.OPEN.ACS.VAX@AC.UK Subject: Date: 28-JUL-1987 11:05:55 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 149 (149) ATTITUDES TO HUMANITIES The York circular on COMPUTING FOR THE HUMANITIES raises a number of important issues. It seems astonishing that we still seem to be in a position where a department in a major University needs to make special efforts to justify provision of specialist services for the humanities. Do I also understand from Sarah Rees Jones message that York has only scientists in its Computing Service? Is this typical? (Here we have 2 advisers with computing science backgrounds, 2 archaeologists and 1 geographer). Here we do not provide special services for the humanities. We consider all our customers equal and attempt to provide the best possible facilities for all disciplines. It is not of concern to us whether someone is a historian or nuclear physicist, only that they need advice. Clearly the fact that our advisers are drawn from a range of disciplines benefits our users, though we are far from able to satisfy every customer due to a combination of limited knowledge and limited resources. The anti-humanities computing attitude which is found in some computing services is an archaic hangover from the days when computers only did 'hard sums' and the humanities only pontificated 'woolly concepts'. It remains a suprise that such attitudes remain as the real expansion area today is in the humanities and not the science areas. If computing services want more cash (beyond the conventional 'procurement' cycle) they need to show a broader range of demand. Long gone are the days when 'overwork' created new posts, now it is neccessary to expand into new areas and add even further to the workload to gain further finance. Hence they should be looking constantly to new markets, and this obviously (to us) includes the humanities. Regardless of the new horizons, cash is very hard to get. If there is a need at a university to designate a specialist adviser then the post will probably have to come from the existing staff complement. I dont think that we need feel embarassed about redirecting resources in this way but clearly the case must be constructed well. I think it would be of use to all of us to find out how many institutions provide specialist support. To repeat (almost) question (1) of Sarah Rees Jones message, does your university provide a 'humanities adviser' or a lectureship in 'humanities computing'? If we find that such provision is very rare then York can argue that they will be 'blazing a new and exciting trail', if it is commonplace then York can argue that their service is not providing the standard of facilities available elsewhere! Andy Boddington Academic Computing Service Open University Milton Keynes U.K. From: SUSAN%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX2@AC.UK Subject: Date: 4-AUG-1987 10:53:22 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 150 (150) Oxford University Computing Service is looking at typesetters (again!), particularly PostScript typesetters such as the Linotronic. The high resolution machines are said to be slow. Does anybody have any detailed information about timings on these machines? Any other experiences would also be welcome. Please - typesetters only, not Laserwriter or other PostScript laserprinters. Susan Hockey, Oxford University Computing Service 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN England SUSAN % VAX2.OXFORD.AC.UK @ AC.UK From: "Timothy W. Seid" Subject: BRIDGING THE GAP FROM BOTH SIDES Date: Wed, 05 Aug 87 08:30:51 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 151 (151) I wrote recently describing what I considered a gap between the humanities and Computer "Science." Nancy Ide wrote me an encouraging note in which she subtlely put "Science" in all caps when referring to my message. When I wrote it, I cringed before I put it down, but went ahead because I wanted to draw a strong distinction. Would it be fair to put this in terms of a gap between the humanities and technology? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems to agree. Recently, the Providence Journal told of MIT's decision to begin a broader liberal arts program for their students in order to prepare them to more adequately work in contemporary society. This is illustrative of the way we can meet each other halfway. From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: BRIDGING THE GAP FROM TIMOTHY'S SEID: a mini-quibble Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 10:36 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 152 (152) I object to "meet each other halfway". It's too easy to be trapped by language into thinking of Science and Humanities each as some distinct entity other than, and comparable to, its opposite. All MIT is saying is that there is other stuff out there (and on its payroll!) which techies-in-train ing ought to spend more time with to come out looking smoother and fitting into corporate hierarchies better. Nobody (including Nancy Ide) has yet addressed my not-so-subtle insistence that there IS no single Humanities "type", "student", "method", "course", or "discipline", and so it becomes siller and sillier to argue about how best to feed its initiates' presumedly distinct, unique, and identifiable needs for computer knowhow. Humanities is EVERYBODY, including scientists, computerists and techies, whenever they wish to think about what they are doing as "the proper study of mankind". Nobody owns it, least of all, I'm afraid, the ever-more-self-assured ACH types. Or so I firmly believe. -Sterling Beckwith Humanities and Music York University From: "Timothy W. Seid" Subject: GAP Date: Wed, 05 Aug 87 12:36:18 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 153 (153) I appreciate Sterling Beckwith's criticism and would like to hear from others too. First of all, I changed my description from SCIENCE to TECHNOLOGY. My guess is that there was a similar problem with the typewriter. How many of us know of older (I'm only 29) scholars who never learned how to type and even resisted using one? My professor does not know how to type on his outdated electric and has an IBM RT PC on his desk which is connected to a CD player with the TLG texts and indices on it, yet writes out by hand his manuscripts and has a secretary type it. I think what Sterling describes is the ideal we are working for but not the reality of the case. I want to refine my analysis further by putting it in terms of SPECIALISTS. Take my earlier example: There is a special discipline of social or cultural anthropology. Yet it has become necessary in my field (history of early Christianity) to be able to describe history in these terms. Some within my field have specialized in this area but all of us, I think, need to be familiar with it. This is the kind of GAP that I'm talking about. It just so happens that with computers, it has been the sciences ("hard sciences") which have mainly had the specialists. Persuading others to become computer capable has its drawbacks. Now I have to share our departments two Mac's with three others instead of having them both to myself like I did last year at this time. I can adjust. From: R.J.HARE%UK.AC.EDINBURGH@AC.UK Subject: Science & Technology vs Humanism Date: 06 Aug 87 10:51:46 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 154 (154) I've read the contributions to this debate with some interest, and a lot of interesting things have been said. I must say though that I regard being moulded to 'fit into a corporate heirarchy' as being probably one of the worst punishments meted out in the hot place down below - worse even than shovelling the entropy into sacks (I mean, it's got to go somewhere hasn't it?). If such is a major (or even a minor) goal of the sort of training people receive in our universities, then God help us all!: That is of course a personal point of view and may be impractical in a world where falling employment is a 'norm'. On the more relevant matter of the 'conflict' between the Arts and the Sciences, can I recommend two books by C P Snow on this subject - they are quite well-known, and I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned them before (maybe they are so well-known as to be not worth mentioning?). Anyway, the two books are 'The Two Cultures' and (I think) 'The Two Cultures Revisited' which was published some years after the first. I read them about fifteen years ago and found them extremely interesting and relevant to this debate which has been going on since long before computers were invented. Roger Hare. From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: computers vs. humanity Date: Thu, 6-AUG-1987 09:01 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 155 (155) 1 Problem--two cultures? I am glad that Roger Hare mentioned Snow's two cultures problem as the background for the current discussion here in these electronic pages about technology ("science") vs. the humanities (should this be in quotes too?). However, the problem that has arisen with the advent of computers into the humanities and other settings of traditionally non-computer users is different, but not new. Someone mentioned his "old professor" still struggling with his typewriter. Here is a problem akin to the advent of the microwave oven as opposed to the older technology of radiant heat ovens, or the gas-barbecue as opposed to the older technology of charcoal barbecues. Some people just have difficulty adapting to new tools; but the new tools just "cook"--they produce the same products. Word processors are just better typewriters when they are used to produce paper and even electronic essays. In the end, we are consuming what we consumed prior to the new technology, but we are producing it quicker--and perhaps with less resources ('person-years') required. Is there another and also a new problem? I believe so--and this problem has been the one that lurks in the shadows. Computers not only replace certain methods of production, but also can be used to produce new entities (products, goods, services, creatures). 2 The problem of how to adjust to the new world of computer creations: This problem cuts across disciplines and professions. Corporate workers in government and industrial bureaucracies, teachers in educational organizations, artists, homemakers, private entrepreneurs... have this problem of how to cope with the new products, new world, created by computers. This new world is the world of software processing that functions quasi-intelligently. For instance: software accounting models that predict and analyze cost-benefit; computer instructional systems that teach; computer graphic systems that generate animations. The difference here is that when the computer "cooks" we get a different type of product. The product is the process--and the process is semi-autonomous. Once set going, it has requirements which the user must satisfy if the user wants to receive the goods. In every technology, there is a process and product. However, there is an aspect of some computer systems where the products, or results, are in a sense by-products, and where the process is the real product. This is akin to our interaction with people, where the mode of interaction is itself the product, and the supposed goals of interaction are in a sense by-products. My point is that we are quite familiar with this situation in our daily lives when interacting with people and other species. We are quite familiar with processes such as teaching, discussing, playing...when in the company of organisms such as people and pets. However, undertaking these similar forms of interaction with semi-autonomous non-organic entities is somewhat disconcerting. In teaching the student can switch classes or the worker can quit, however, the law and morality prohibits the student and worker from killing the teacher or manager he dislikes. However, the user can "kill" the instructional system, or the accounting system--he can even, if he is the programmer--change the "soul" of the system. So it seems. Unfortunately, there is a new ethic, with enforcement by law in some cases, killing or tampering with the software when one is not "licenced" to do so is forbidden. It is not merely a matter of copywrite protection, but of maintaining software integrity. 3 The new problem: The new problem is: how should we interact with semi-autonomous computer systems that perform like people? Some computer developers and critics, such as Winograd and the Dreyfuss's in their recent books, do not want the problem to even get off the ground because they want to shelve machines that perform like people. But part of their hesitation has to do with the realization that the more we allow semi-autonomous systems to perform people-functions, such as teaching, game-playing, art-making...the more responsibility and skills we give to and give up to these systems. For instance, calculators, some teachers fear, take away elementary arithmetic skills from children (and adults). But why worry? Will we give up more serious thinking skills to computer systems--such as helping students to diagnose their intellectual problems--once we allow computer systems to perform more of the functions that we have done solely with human resources? Recently, someone told me of an incident with one of the pioneers of logic teaching computer systems. He introduced computer assisted logic teaching systems into his intro logic courses. The final step was that he allowed the computer system to teach the entire course. Students only came to see him either if they were to advanced or to behind the computer system--which was only a small number. The majority were satisfied to work solely with the computer. However, the administration soon caught on to this situation and wondered why he needed graduate assistants for his course. So, the teacher in order to save his requirements for assistants retreated and returned to only allowing the computer logic teaching system to function as a supplementary system. Of course, what he really wanted was to have more interaction with the majority of students. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Scientists and Humanists Date: 6 August 1987, 09:02:03 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 156 (156) The mention of C. P. Snow's famous "Two Cultures" has blown the dust off a paperback volume I still have from the days of teaching composition to students of engineering: "The Scientist vs. the Humanist," ed. Geo. Levine and Owen Thomas, published by W. W. Norton in the U.S. in 1963. (I bought it for $2.75!) It contains pieces from the 18th century (Swift and Johnson) to recent times (Oppenheimer and Rabi). The bibliography begins with Aristophanes, runs through Bacon to Brecht, and includes an article by Kenney, "Dead Horse Flogged Again." It's not a bad collection, on not an unsuitable topic, for the kind of course one could imagine being taught to undergraduates who find themselves in the cross-disciplinary soup we are cooking. The horse is old, to be sure, but unless a person kills it for himself I don't see how it could ever be dead. The impact of computing on humanists, many of whom have never had direct exposure to the sciences, involves both dangers and considerable opportunities for renewal. I think the dangers have mostly to do with what might be called a Freudian envy of the sciences (and, more recently, of commerce), which has possessed many an unwary soul. The interesting thing is that this object of envy is so often a projection, compounded of fear and desire, which has little resemblance to what actually goes on in the sciences -- when they are intelligently practised -- and in commerce. I found Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions very stimulating in this regard; his description of how science is done seemed to me not unlike how I conduct myself as a literary critic. The opportunities for renewal seem to me mostly to stem from the understanding we can gain of how humanists have always done their work, which may indeed turn out to be how thoughtful human beings have always thought. I doubt there is much really new in this, but to "renew it daily" (supposedly the motto on Confucius' bathtub) is simply intellectual survival. I've attended conferences where people have said that the humanities are moribund, and I've talked to others who say that the kind of intramural world that has allowed the humanities to exist is no longer possible. These people tend to look to computing as a saviour from extinction and ticket to full participation in the modern world, with all the rewards it offers. We seal our own doom, however, if we cannot restate from within our own group of disciplines the unchanging value of the humanistic scholarly life to ourselves and to our society, even if most of its members won't understand. As one of my teachers was fond of saying, there's no such thing as dead literature, only dead readers. It seems to me that computing in the humanities furnishes a very good interdisciplinary framework within which to restate what has never ceased being true. The financial pressures on our universities make this restatement absolutely vital. What can't be used gets sold. From: Willard McCarty Subject: HUMANIST BIOGRAFY in print? Date: 7 August 1987, 13:40:36 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 157 (157) Nancy Ide of the ACH has proposed that the whole of HUMANIST BIOGRAFY be published in the ACH Newsletter. Please reread what you contributed; let me know if you object (a) in principle to your biographical statement being set down in the cool and authoritative print of the Newsletter, or (b) to the current version being printed. If you object to the latter, you will need to supply me with a replacement, let us say before the end of this month. If you have no objections please say nothing -- I get sufficient electronic mail as it is. Thanks for your continuing participation. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 158 (158) Autobiographies of HUMANISTs First Supplement Following are 20 additional entries to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group and 1 update to an existing entry. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to MCCARTY at UTOREPAS.BITNET. W.M. 10 August 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 159 (159) *Beckwith, Sterling 248 Winters College, York University, 4700 Keele St., North York, Ontario (416) 736-5142 or 5186. I teach at York University, have created and taught the only Humanities course dealing with computers, in the context of Technology, Culture and the Arts, and serve as director of computer music in the Faculty of Fine Arts, at York. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 160 (160) *Boddington, Andy Academic Computing Service, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA I am a Research Adviser at The OU responsible for advising a broad range of disciplines but specialising in the arts and social sciences. My particular interests professionally at the OU are in encouraging conferencing and developing data handling and data analysis packages for the non-scientist and the 'computer timid'. I also specialise in statistical analysis. I am an archaeologist by training and inclination I am particularly active in propagating computing as an analytical tool within archaeology; as well as the benefits of desk top publishing to a discipline which produces large volumes of printed emphemera. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 161 (161) *Brown, Malcolm gx.mbb@stanford.bitnet ACIS/IRIS Sweet Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-3091 Humanities background. Undergraduate: UC Santa Cruz, BAs in Philosophy, German Literature Graduate: Universitaet Freiburg (two years); Stanford University (German Studies). Dissertation: "Nietzsche und sein Verleger Ernst Schmeitzner: eine Darstellung ihrer Beziehungen" Primary interests: European intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the present Computer background. Systems experience: IBM MVS, IBM VM/CMS; DEC TOPS-20; Berkeley 4.3 UNIX; PC- DOS and MS-DOS; Apple Macintosh. Current responsibilities. I support the Stanford Humanities faculty in all aspects of computer usage. We are currently looking at ways in which more powerful microcomputers (PS/2, Mac II) might assist humanist scholars in their research. Additional interests. all aspects of text processing, from data entry (such as scanning) to printing, which might loosely be called digital typography. Especially: page description (e.g. PostScript), typesetting (e.g. TeX, Interleaf, PageMaker etc), typeface design. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 162 (162) *Brunner, Theodore F. Theodore F. Brunner, Director, Thesaurus Linguae, Graecae, University of California Irvine, Irvine CA 92717. My telephone number is (714) 856-6404. Short description of the TLG: A computer-based data bank of ancient Greek literature extant from the period between Homer and A.D. 600 (we are now beginning to expand the data bank through 1453). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 163 (163) *Choueka, Yaacov Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 164 (164) I am the Secretary of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and a member of the editorial committee of Literary and Linguistic Computing, and co-author (with B. H. Rudall) of Computers and Literature: a Practical Guide, recently published by Abacus Press, along with a number of articles and papers on humanities computing. I look forward to hearing from you. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 165 (165) *Cover, Robin C. Assistant Professor of Semitics and Old Testament 3909 Swiss Avenue; Dallas, TX 75204 USA; I am the faculty coordinator of the (current) "Committee for the Academic Computerization of Campus"; we are just beginning to face up to the need for a distinct entity which will be responsible for academic applications of computers: software development for textual analysis; multi-lingual word processing; supervision of the student computer lab (with CAI for Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew); purchase of workstation equipment dedicated to textual analysis (micro-IBYCUS, etc); faculty education in humanistic computing; etc. My specific role now is to represent to the administration the need for this new entity, the precedent for it (at other universities); definition of the role of the entity within institutional purpose; proposal for staffing, funding and organizational structure; etc. My special interests are in MRT archives and text retrieval programs to study encoded texts. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 166 (166) *Curtis, Jared Curtis Department of English, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 (604) 291-3130 I conduct research in textual criticism, including the use of computers, teach "Humanities research and computers" to graduate students, and give advice to colleagues and students. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 167 (167) *Erdt, Terry Graduate Dept. of Library Science, Villanova University, Villanova PA 19085 (215) 645-4688 My interests, at this point in time, can be said to be optical character recognition, scholar's workstation, and the computer as medium from the perspective of the field of popular culture. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 168 (168) *Goldfield, Joel Assistant Professor of French, Dept. of Foreign Languages, Plymouth State College, Plymouth, NH 03264; Tel. 603-536-5000, ext. 2277 My work focuses on stylostatistical and content analysis, especially in the field of 19th-century French literature. I am currently developing a sub-field called "computational thematics" wherein a selective database based on conceptually organized words and including frequency norms for appropriately lemmatized entries can be applied to thematic and content analysis. My current application is to the 19th-century diplomat and author, Arthur de Gobineau, his use of "tic words" and other stylistic traits disputed by Michael Riffaterre and Leo Spitzer. I attempt to resolve this controversy through this conceptual, thematic, and stylostatistical approach. See the project description listed by Klaus Schmidt in the latest newsletter/booklet from the Society for Conceptual and Content Analysis (SCCAC). I would welcome comments on database structures, stylostatistical applications and programming from other UNIX users, who may want to compare their experiences with those I described in my article for the ACTES of the ALLC meeting in Nice (1985), a 1986 publication by Slatkine, vol. 1. I am hoping to prepare a manuscript on humanities computing on the UNIX system for publication within the next 3 years and would welcome all suggestions for contributions. The scope may be restricted later to literary and linguistic applications, depending on contributions and an eventual publisher's preferences, but, for the moment, everything is wide open. The only real computer connection with what I teach here in the University System of New Hampshire (Plymouth State College) is computer-assisted instruction/interactive videotape & videodisk. My 4-course/sem. teaching load typically includes 2 beginning French course sections, 1 intermediate course, and an advanced one (translation, culture & conversation, 19th-cen. Fr. lit., or history & civ.). I also conduct innovative FL teaching methodology workshops and consult with various public school and college foreign language departments on evaluating, using and authoring CALI/interactive video. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 169 (169) *Hare, Roger Training Group, Computing Service, University of Edinburgh, 59 George Square, Edinburgh, Scotland. Graduated in Applied Physics from Lanchester Polytechnic (Coventry) in 1972. First exposure to computing in second year course (algol on an Elliot 803), and third year training period (Fortran on IBM and Honewell machines at UKAEA Harwell). Thereafter spent several years working in the hospital service in Manchester and Edinburgh, mostly in the area of respiratory physiology and nuclear medicine. Computing interests re-awakened on moving to Edinburgh in 1974. After a couple of years away from computing, followed by a couple of years working as an 'advisor/programmer/trouble-shooter' for a bureau, re-joined Edinburgh University in 1980 as an 'adviser/programmer/trouble-shooter' on the SERC DECSystem-10 in 1980. After three years or so in this job, joined the Training Unit of the Computer Centre (now the Computing Service) where I have remained. We teach various aspects of computing, but my own interests are in the Humanities area (amongst others), literary analysis, languages suitable for teaching computing to non-numerate non-scientists, computerised document preparation (I don't like the terms word-processing and text-processing) and puncturing the arrogant idea held by many scientists that computers are solely for use by scientists, etc. I am currently looking (or trying to find the time to look) at Icon, Prolog, Lisp, Simula, Pop (?), etc. (I gave up on C!), with a view to using one of these as a language to teach programming to humanists. The first thing I have noted is that my head is starting to hurt! The second is that Icon seems to be a good idea for this sort of thing, though I am not deep enough into the language yet to be sure. If anyone out there has any ideas/experience on this one, I'll be happy to pick their brains... From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 170 (170) *Holmes, Glyn <42104_263@uwovax.UWO.CDN> Department of French, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7. Phone: (519) 679-2111 ext. 5713/5700. Main area of research is computer-assisted language learning, with emphasis on input analysis and instructional design. Most of my publications have been in these areas. I have also taught a course on French and the Computer, which covered CALL, literary and linguistic computing, use of databases, etc. I am the editor of Computers and the Humanities. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 171 (171) *Hulver, Barron Houck Computing Center, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074 My position is technical support analyst. Basically I assist students and faculty in trying to use our computers and networks. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 172 (172) *Kashiyama, Paul I AM A PHILOSOPHY PH.D. CANDIDATE AT YORK UNIVERSITY CONCENTRATING IN THE AREA OF ETHIC AND JURISPRUDENCE. I AM PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN THE POTENTIAL ROLES COMPUTERS/AI WOULD PLAY IN FORMULATIONS OF ETHICAL/LEGAL JUDGMENTS; AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION OF WHETHER SUCH JUDGMENTS ARE ADEQUATE REPLACEMENTS FOR HUMAN DECISIONS OR AT LEAST ADEQUATE MODELS OF ETHICAL AND LEGAL DECISION MAKING PROCEDURES. MY BACKGROUND IN COMPUTING INCLUDES PROGRAMMING IN BASIC,PASCAL, PROLOG, SOME C, APPLICATIONS PROGRAMMING IN FRED,DBASEIII+, TRAINING AND TEACHING EXPERIENCES IN DATABASE MANAGEMENT, SPREDSHEET ORGANIZATION, WORD PROCESSING AND INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING FOR CHILDREN AND BUSINESS PERSONS USING PERSONAL / MICRO COMPUTERS. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 173 (173) *Matheson, Philippa MW Athenians Project, Dept. of Classics, Victoria College, Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5S 1A1 (416) 585-4469 My university affiliation is the ATHENIANS project, Victoria College, University of Toronto, and my humanist computing activities are varied: programs for the Canadian classics journal, Phoenix; all forms of computer and scholarly aid for the ATHENIANS (Prosopography of ancient Athens) project; an attempt to establish a bibliography of articles in Russian (translated) on the subject of amphoras (ancient wine jars) on the EPAS machine; as well as trying to exchange amphora data for a database project on the stamps on ancient wine jars (called, imaginatively, AMPHORAS). I call myself a computer consultant, and am mostly consulted about how to make PCs deal with Greek... From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 174 (174) *McCarthy, William J. Dept. of Greek and Latin, Catholic University of America, Wash., D.C. 20064 (202) 635-5216/7 Although untrained in computer science - and doubtless possessing little aptitude for it -, I have plunged considerable time into an effort to harness for myself and my colleagues the powerful tools of study and "productivity" which the computer offers to accommodating scholars. My hope is that groups such as HUMANIST will be able, in some way, to guide the development of a fruitful conjunction of technology and humanism. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 175 (175) *McGregor, John University of Durham, Abbey House, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RS, UK Areas of interest: Septuagint/ Greek/ CALL/ Bible Present status: Developing CALL software for NT/Biblical Greek From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 176 (176) *Roosen-Runge, Peter H. Dept. of Computer Science, York University, 4700 Keele St., North York (416) 736-5053 I have been involved with supporting and extending computing in the humanities for many years (I think I taught the first course at the UofT on computing for humanists in 1968!) Current projects include melody generation based on a model of a "listener" expressed in Prolog, and a music database system under Unix. I am also very interested in the impact of large comprehensive text databases on teaching, and the role of universities in creating and publishing such databases; but I am only in the early stages of formulating a research project in this area. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 177 (177) *Seid, Timothy W. 74 Clyde St., W. Warwick, RI 02983 Box 1927, Religious Studies Dept., Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 (401) 828-5485; (401) 863-3401 My interest in computers began when I first entered the doctoral program in History of Religions: Early Christianity two years ago soon grew to the point of being the department's Distributed Computer Support Person. During last year, when TA positions were scarce, I was able to get a Computer Proctorship. Again, for this next year, I will hold such a position. The main project, for which we have an Educational Computing Grant from the university, will be to develop a CAI which will teach students about textual criticism--in simulation for the under- graduate course in Earliest Christianity and using the ancient languages for the graduate seminar. Two personal projects have to do with word- division of ancient Greek manuscripts and scanned images of the same. I'm also a member of Brown University's Computing in the Humanities User's Group (CHUG) and co-leader of the Manuscript Criticism Working group of CHUG. As a service to the department and the University at- large, I maintain RELISTU, a Religious Studies Common Segment on the mainframe on which I archive the ONLINE NOTES and the BIBLICAL SCHOLARS ON BITNET ADDRESS BOOK and have the first version of the CAI I've called TEXT EDIT. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 178 (178) *Sitman, David Computation Centre, Tel Aviv University I teach courses in the use of computers in language study and I am an advisor on computer use in the humanities. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 179 (179) *Zayac, Sue I work for the Columbia University "Scholarly Information Center". This is an experimental union of the Libraries and the Computer Center designed to "stimulate and support the productive and creative use of information technology by our faculty and students" - Pat Battin, Vice President and University Librarian "Information technology" includes everything from parchment to CD-ROM, and from thumbing through a 3x5 card catalog to searching a database on a new supercomputer from the Vax workstation on your desk. My title is Senior User Services Consultant, Academic Information Services Group. My areas of responsibility are statistical programs, particularly SPSSX and SAS, word-processing, particular the mainframe text-formatting product, SCRIBE, and a smattering of anything and everything that anybody might ask me. I have a BA in Geology from Barnard College and a Masters from the Columbia University School of Public Health (major area was Population and Family Health). I'm one of the few people at the Computer Center who didn't major in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering. One of my great uses here is to play the part of "everyuser". Interests are classical archaeology (I almost majored in Greek and Latin, but realized in time I had no talent for languages), history of science, history in general, ballet, arm chair astronomy (I don't like the cold), gardening, and nature watching. I once did rock climbing but, like many of us in the computer field, I've gotten out of shape sitting in front of a monitor all day long. Mail is welcome, on any topic. From: ARCHIVE@VAX3.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: Date: 11-AUG-1987 14:34:26 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 180 (180) OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIP The British Library has recently approved a grant to fund a one- year research assistantship in the Oxford Text Archive at Oxford University Computing Service (OUCS). The person appointed will be required to investigate current and potential applications of machine readable texts in a scholarly context. A survey will be made of current usage, and recommendations produced about ways of integrating existing machine readable texts (e.g. typesetting tapes) into a text database. Applicants should have some experience of academic research, enthusiasm for text processing in the humanities and preferably some background knowledge of database or electronic publishing. It is hoped to appoint to the post with effect from January 1988, on the Research Scale 1A (#8,185-#14,825, under review). For more information, e-mail LOU@UK.AC.OX.VAX1, or write to Mrs D. Clarke, Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN From: sano%VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV@Hamlet Subject: RE: HUMANIST BIOGRAFY in print? Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 13:39:46 PDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 181 (181) Willard, If the biografy is going to print, I'd like to change mine. Unfortunatel y, my vlsi machine is going down tomorrow for a facility move which is only supposed to take a week. I'll try to get on and send you a new biografy, but if I don't, please don't print it. Thanks. Haj From: Willard McCarty Subject: Review of Discussions Date: 12 August 1987, 14:54:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 182 (182) The following is a draft for an article that will appear in the forthcoming Newsletter of the ACH. The first part describes HUMANIST, the second part summarizes the discussions that have taken place here in the last two months. The plan is to create a summary of discussions every three months for the ACH Newsletter and for the Journal of the ALLC and to publish these summaries here as well. It seems to me that we need periodic reminding of what has happened on HUMANIST to give this rapidly flowing medium some continuity. Comments on this summary, either about its form or its content, are welcome. Please send them to me directly. W.M. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- HUMANIST So Far: A Review of the First Two Months One of the first activities of the new Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources has been to establish an international electronic discussion group, HUMANIST, on the Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN node in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of HUMANIST is to link together those who in any way support computing in the humanities in the terms defined by the new SIG. Initially HUMANIST was focused on discovering a common professional identity among its members; although this remains a strong interest, its horizons have expanded considerably. HUMANIST's first message was sent out on 13 May to approximately two dozen people in three countries. As of the end of July, HUMANIST has grown to nearly 100 people in 9 countries around the world, and membership continues to grow. To be included an individual must only be involved in some way with the support of humanities computing; he or she need not be a member of the ACH or ALLC, although membership in these organizations is actively encouraged. Because we do not really know what it means, this "support" is in practice very loosely defined. Technically speaking, HUMANIST is a list of names and addresses kept by ListServ software on the IBM 4381 known as UTORONTO. When ListServ receives an ordinary e-mail message addressed to HUMANIST@UTORONTO by anyone on the list, it automatically mails a copy to every other person on the list. The sender need not be on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN but can communicate to HUMANIST from any network with a gateway to Bitnet. Unlike conferencing systems, ListServ does not permit subdivision of a discussion group into subtopics. It is thus like a large seminar on a very general topic, in which everyone is privy to everything everyone else says. De facto subdivision can be achieved by direct e-mail conversations among members, but ListServ does nothing to assist this. Every list has one or more "owners," who have supervisory rights that may be varied in their degree of control. HUMANIST has two: Steve Younker, the "postmaster" of the UTORONTO node, who helps with problems related to the network itself, and Willard McCarty, the editor. HUMANIST has been set up such that an individual must ask the editor to be given membership, but once he or she is a member mailing privileges are unrestricted. The lack of control in this regard inevitably leads to some unpleasant floods of junk-mail, but it also permits free-ranging discussion and frees everyone from the inhibiting burden of dictatorial powers and duties. The membership has indeed been patient and forgiving as well as very lively during the initial period. A few mutually respected rules of etiquette have evolved. Direct conversations among members interested in highly specialized topics are encouraged, with the understanding that the originator of the special discussion will summarize the results for everyone else. Direct conversions are especially recommended when a HUMANIST asks for specific information, e.g., "Where can I find worthwhile reviews of Nota Bene?" Members are also encouraged to identify the subjects of contributions and themselves by name. Because someone applying for membership in HUMANIST must say what he or she does to support computing in the humanities, the owner has accumulated many interesting biographical statements. These were recently gathered together, cursorily edited, and sent out to all HUMANISTs in order to introduce everyone to everyone else and thus to help define a professional identity. Supplements are planned as new members' statements accumulate. Tim Maher (Computing Services, Berkeley) is meanwhile working on a more detailed and systematic questionnaire. In many respects HUMANIST fulfills the late Marshall McLuhan's vision of the "global village," in which the great physical distances that separate its members almost cease to matter. It is for that reason a fascinating sociological experiment. Of course HUMANIST is used to disseminate information, but the interaction of personalities, perspectives, and ideas bulks much larger in my growing file of contributions than exchanges of facts. The Discussions Since the first contribution on 19 May, several types of discussions have occurred. I count 7 concerned with the etiquette of contributing to HUMANIST, 8 requests for specific information, and one advertisement of a job. On 5 occasions it has been used to announce publication of or offer subscription to both printed and electronic sources of information, and 6 conferences and calls for papers have been published this way. Interestingly, one HUMANIST's objections to the program for the forthcoming conference at Oberlin -- he pointed to the repetition of issues raised earlier at the Vassar conference -- resulted in a thorough exploration and defense of the rationale for the conference. As one defender put it, the later conference returns to the issues of the first because both are dealing with difficult and important questions: "what it is we want our students to learn, the nature of the world into which we are sending them, and the relationship both of technology and (more fundamentally) the algorithmic approach to problem-solving." 1. Programming in the curriculum. The unresolved nature of these questions is demonstrated by the prior and independent discussion on HUMANIST about the teaching of programming to students in the humanities. Some comments addressed the virtues and limitations of specific languages, such as Prolog or Icon, or of languages of a specific generation. The more interesting contributions, however, circled around the question, "Why should arts students learn programming at all?" One HUMANIST concluded that "the more basic task is to teach undergraduates, and people in general, how to recognize problems, identify and characterize them, understand their nature, and then to determine which tool may be appropriate for the problem." Another noted the analogy with learning classical languages (formerly the usual means of acquiring intellectual discipline) and concluded by saying that teaching students a computational language will show them "how to approach and analyze a problem from a computational point of view. And that will help them both in the Big Bad World... and in the academic world... where humanists need more than ever to understand how to express a problem clearly in computational terms in order to get not just a correct answer but the correct answer to the question they want to ask. It will also help them, if they remain in the academic world, to view with proper skepticism both those humanists who deny that the computer can be a valuable tool... and those who think the computer can solve any question it is worthwhile asking better than a human being can." 2. Professional recognition and electronic publishing Another substantive discussion began with the vexing problem of professional academic recognition for work in humanities computing and with the desire to exploit the electronic medium for publication. The latter issue is related to the former, since electronic publication carries with it no professional kudos and may preempt the conventional kind. The latter, however, is in some cases too slow to keep pace with developments in the field, so that, for example, reviews of software may be obsolete by the time they see print. The formality of print may also inhibit as well as encourage higher standards of work. Some HUMANISTs commented that they would always opt for publication in print unless journal editors were agreeable to pre-publication in electronic form. Unrestricted redistribution would be a problem, as would the availability and reliability of electronic networks around the world. The lack of typographic sophistication as well as diacritical marks makes imitation of printed journals impossible. "The technology isn't up to it," one person said. Another remarked, however, that since HUMANIST is non-refereed, publication there would be in a different category from the conventional kind, somewhat like the circulation of a technical report in computer science. The trick is to exploit rather than be thwarted by the characteristics of the medium. A change in how research in the humanities is done could result. The appearance of this column in the ACH Newsletter represents a link with conventional publication and an attempt to exploit the new medium, but it does not do much about the problem of professional credit. There was little disagreement about the lack of professional RECOGNITION. ONE HUMANIST REMARKED, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT IN HIS department "writing software ranked dead last in a list of 35 activities considered worthy for English faculty." He went on to note, however, that "I was not hired to work with computers.... So, it is to some degree my own doing." He advised younger, untenured members "to be sure that their computer activity officially be made part of their job description," but he concluded by noting that most of the work in humanities computing does not itself constitute research, at least not in the humanities. This is, of course, a serious issue, since it raises the question of our scholarly and academic legitimacy. It may be significant that there have been no replies to a direct question posed on HUMANIST about our scholarly contribution to humanistic scholarship. One contributor had suggested earlier that work in humanities computing might be considered on a par with the editing of texts or assembling of bibliographies, for example. The most vexing problems with making use of this analogy seem to point to the juvenality of an emerging discipline: the lack of peer-review, hence of quality-control; the confusion over aims and possibilities; and indeed, the fluid nature of terms and definitions. The exchanges over these issues on HUMANIST have been desultory, but the existence of an electronic forum promises to accelerate the shaping of this new discipline. 3. Desktop publishing. HUMANISTs also discussed the impact and potential of desktop publishing. The originator noted the many problems with formal electronic publication but remarked that "using electronic means to improve the quality of conventional scholarly publishing really seems to me an exciting possibility." To the dire predictions of decline in quality she opposed the great advantage for the academic editor or scholarly research project of being able to control book production as well as to reduce its cost greatly. A respondent noted two reasons for decline in quality: (1) the typographical superiority of traditional methods; and (2) the lack of required skills characteristic of most desktop publishers. Since improvements in technology will likely soon close the gap between new and old methods, the second item is really the central problem. As he remarked, "Really good work in this area cannot be done by amateurs," who are mostly unable to judge the quality of what they are producing. Another HUMANIST, who works at a major academic publishing house, described a "do-it-yourself" (rather than desktop) facility that to date has produced over 200 scholarly volumes. She stressed the role of the typographic department of the press in helping an author design a volume; or, when the author does not yet have a press, of other books in providing models for him to follow. She remarked that "On the whole... our users have been quite conscientious and have made considerable efforts to produce texts which have a pleasing appearance." Ironically, she noted that the generally high quality of these texts may be in part attributable to the fact that this system is considerably less "friendly" than the usual desktop publishing software. The user is forced to learn several unfamiliar typographical terms, "all of which remind him that he is dabbling in an area of considerable tradition and expertise and art, and encourage him to walk with caution, possibly even respect." Conclusion We plan to review the activities of HUMANIST in the ACH Newsletter on a regular basis. These reviews will also be published on HUMANIST itself in order to remind the members what has happened and thus to give them the opportunity to renew a lapsed discussion. Anyone wishing to join HUMANIST should send an e-mail note to MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET, giving a brief professional biography. As I have mentioned above, these biographies will later be circulated to all HUMANISTs. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: COMPUTERS VS. HUMANITY Date: Wed, 12-AUG-1987 16:13 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 183 (183) 1 To Lou Burnard: Thanks for your comments. 2 I agree that there is insecurity about computers. Some of it is warranted --as far as job security goes. For instance, in Canada there are currently 19,000 draftsmen. In two years from now, it is predicted that there will be 900--due to the coming of CAD (computer-aided drafting). 3 As far as Snow and the two-cultures problem goes; this problem transcends its parochial background. It is a fact that people in the humanities and arts are ignorant, by and large, of current science, and scientific methodology. Scientists, by and large, are ignorant of the humanities. So what? That's the problem--what is the significance of the gap? 4 About word processors. I started using word processors about six years ago. What made me excited about using this technology was that it allowed me to combine two or three processes: 1. First hand written draft. 2. 'N' typed draft. 3. Cut and past. 4. Step 2 to produce N+1 typed draft and 3 and 4. ('4' is a recursive function.) I also use step 1 when I find myself too far from my key board; and then replace the typewriter with the word processor. Now I am even more excited about word processors than when I first started using them. For instance, the one I am using now to compose this reply, allows one to automate foot-noting, structuring (in terms of sections, and sub-sections), and automate a table of contents and index. Of course, it comes with a spelling-checker with a facility for making several custom dictionaries. However, by and large, I expect to produce the same old product--paper essays. Also, the cognitive functions supported by this process--in so far as word-processing expedites cut-and-paste--are no different than the hardware cut-and-paste. (Scrolling a typed text merely expedites cut-and-paste.) 5 Is there anything qualitatively new introduced by word processors? Yes--only in so far as they are used in conjunction with electronic journals/mail/bulletin boards to produce electronically stored essays, etc., that can be accessed quickly and virtually universally. In effect, we will open up the exclusive world of intellectual products to a wide audience of non-professional scholars who will be able to join in this world without requiring the luxury of an academic position. This widening of the academic world, or access to intellectual products without requiring an academic position, will not only widen the arena of discussion, but will (or could) open up new intellectual problems for discussion, and create new jargons and methodologies as required for the discussion of these problems. 5.1 But once these electronic journals replace paper-media, an unfortunate loss will be the art of typography. Furthermore, once people cotton to the idea that physical libraries, and full time attendance in university courses, could be replaced by electronic libraries and computer-assisted instruction, libraries and librarians, and universities and professors may become redundant or surplus. Instead of spending years in university and then taking on a job; people could join companies with their own educational institutes, computer-assisted job-training and skill-enhancing courses. I'm not sure where liberal arts courses would fit into this world--perhaps they will be treated as leisure time, continuing education courses, to be taken after work hours along with cooking, sailing, photography, creative writing, etc. But again, perhaps people will work 9 hours a week from home-offices at their computer terminals, and be capable of pursuing full-time research, if they wish, from their computer terminals, and attendance at traditional universities--where they could have face-to-face contact with professional teachers. 6 To conclude: I disagree with you about the qualitatively new features introduced by word processors. However, when they are used in conjunction with electronic mail/journals/bulletin boards, they do permit rapid access and participation in a world of thought, that could open up this world to a larger audience of non-dedicated scholars, or non-professional scholars. This could both universalize thinking, and produce new sub-groups with new jargons and new intellectual problems, heretofore uninvented due to the limited resources available for pursuing intellectual past-times. From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: WORD PROCESSORS AND THINKING Date: Wed, 12-AUG-1987 16:14 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 184 (184) An afterthought to my previous response: Do word processors add anything qualitatively new to the function of writing and thinking-writing? I welcome your comment that scrolling through finished looking texts is a new function of computer word processors. Automated spelling checks and grammar checks are also new functions. However, the automated spelling checker I have doesn't check for context. It only checks the spelling of the word, and ignores whether the word is the wrong word for a given context. To check for context requires natual language understanding, which still is at the rudimentary stage in A.I. research and development. My point is that not all new technological functions do anything that is qualitatively new for a process to which they provide support, or for the products which they help make. Still do word processors enhance thinking, or in your words, the marshalling of ideas? Cognitive psychological studies of expert writers reveal that these writers use their writing as a means for revising their understanding of problems, and for improving their solutions of these problems. In physical terms, this involves, cut and paste, deletion, addition, modification, and rewrite of entire text. It is true that when one does this on a computer, it is neeter in looking like a finished product, and one can do this quicker without having to use tape or glue, and also less paper ends up in the waste bucket. So, the speed of this process on computer, though no different in function or type when done manually with scissors, glue, paper, typewriter, waste bucket... because it is so much greater, permits a greater number of revisions that each look finished, but are not really--as far as the intellectual process of clarifying and improving one's ideas goes. In that respect, word processing could enhance thinking by allowing for more revisions in less time with less physical effort. But, I don't think word processing adds a new dimension to thinking, or adds new features to our thought processsing. From: Willard McCarty Subject: The scholarly contribution of humanities computing Date: 12 August 1987, 16:22:47 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 185 (185) I received the following comment from Abigail Young that is thoughtful and lengthy enough to be passed on immediately to everyone else rather than saved for a later summary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have been mulling over your words about computing and a scholarly contribution to humanistic research at the end of #2 in the summary of discussion. I think a lot of the problem is one of definition. For example, REED makes, as a scholarly project engaged in documentary editing and publishing, a solid contribution to two areas of the humanities at least, history and literature. But our computing here is pretty pedestrian: it's central to the project, but what we are doing is to use the computer to do now things that humanists have been doing since at least the Renaissance. I wouldn't feel that computing was making a truly new contribution to the humanities unless it were possible to make a qualitative rather than a quantitative advance in humanistic studies by means of computing, that is, not doing something more accurately or more quickly, but doing something which could not have been done at all, was not even thought of, before. That doesn't mean I don't think that the contributions that computers make in assisting research and writing are impor- tant, especially databases for historical and certain kinds of literary research. I think they are very important. But they are merely providing better tools to do tasks we have always wanted to do. I'm not sure that there are truly new contributions to humanities to be made by computing, but if there are, I think the novelty will have to wear off before we can recognize them. This is, I suspect, a reactionary and heterodox view; and it may be all wrong: I may only think it because of my lack of familiarity with the cutting edge of humainites computing. And I emphasize that I don't at all mean that computing isn't a valuable and in many ways essential tool for humanists. But in my mind this is the reason why there has been no direct response to the question to which you alluded in your report. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 12 August 1987, 19:09:23 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 186 (186) The following contribution was send with an incorrect node ID. It is a missing piece of a discussion to which everyone received a two-part reply earlier today. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Date: 12-AUG-1987 10:21:54 > From: LOU@VAX1.OXFORD.AC.UK > To: humanist@UTOREPAS <---NOTE BAD NODENAME! > Subject: two kulchurs > > Subj: msg=> S_RICHMOND%UTOROISE@RL.EARN: Re: computers vs. humanity > > I'm not sure I like the cooking analogy, so I'm going to pursue the > typewriter/word processor one. It seems to me that a wordprocessor is not > just a better sort of typewriter; or rather that the difference is more > qualitatative than quantitative. Both engines enable one to produce a written > document; which is a complex operation involving the disposition of symbols on > a piece of paper, but also the marshalling of ideas in the mind. It seems to > me, after many years experience of both, that the wordprocessor actually > helps as much with the latter as it does with the former. Drafting things > out on paper is, by comparison, clumsy, where anything more than very prelimin ar > concept maps or headings etc is concerned. The wp, by making it easy to scroll > back and forth thro a text which always looks as if it has just been typed > even tho it may have been changed over and over again, changes the way > i compose texts, and i think for the better. There isn't any analogy for > this process, because it's a new function that simply wasn't > there in the old technology. Why then do people persistently want to find > analogies for what computers can do, and say "aaargh they are usurping the > human role" when they fail to find one? Insecurity perhaps? I think being > human is also about being a tool-user, homo faber; I have no patience with > the attitude that despises that part of the human spirit. As for > C.P. Snow, his novels are rooted in a deep insecurity occasioned by attitudes > (prevalent in Whitehall in the 50s, but now rather reversed) of a > classically-educated establishment to the arriving technocracy; as such > they are polemic, partisan and almost totally unreadable, because of Snow's > total lack of understanding of human nature. > > Lou Burnard > > From: R.J.HARE@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Subject: C P Snow etc. Date: 13 Aug 87 10:03:42 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 187 (187) Picking up the points made by Lou Burnard and S.Richmond about C P Snow etc. , I certainly agree that C P Snow's novels are 'almost unreadable' for just the reason.s that are given by LB - indeed one major example in 'The Two Cultures' relates to the attitudes of the arts-biased establishment towards the slightly naff science and engineering educated portion of the human race; and to Snow's attempts to influence that attitude at dinner parties with reference (I think) to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I think that the problem these days is probably a little less one-sidedthan either Snow or SR seem to imply - unfortunately scientists look down on artists *and* artists look down on scientists. I certainly regard it as part of my job to try and break down these artificial barriers, and would also regard it as being essential for *anyone* whatever their background, who is involved in Humanities Computing to have something approaching the same outlook. There is no room for the "what on earth would an arts student want to learn programming for?" syndrome. This is not a hypothetical question, but a verbatim rendering of a question asked me by one of my colleagues some time ago. Roger Hare. From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: word processing and the two cultures Date: Thu, 13-AUG-1987 09:10 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 188 (188) 1 Response to Susan Zayac: Studies of expert writers by cognitive psychologists have revealed that what distinguishes the 'novice' from the 'expert' is that novices use the strategy of writing down their thoughts in a free-association, first in the mind, first out on paper strategy. Thus, word processors--if used only in a linear manner to get out ideas onto paper--could reinforce novice thinking-writing habits. However, because of the ease of the cut-and-paste function of word processors, when used in the looping manner of enter-revise-re-enter, word processing could encourage the acquisition of expert-strategies of thinking-writing. Admittedly, and happily, dyslexics report that word processing has allowed them to produce comprehensible texts because they do not have to worry about spelling, and orthography. That is, the problem that dyslexics face, unlike novice writers--in getting down their thoughts before they run out--is in writing something remotely legible. A sharper way of putting the question I previously asked about whether word processing enhances thinking-- Does word processing create any new and powerful cognitive strategies? 2 Response to Roger Hare: C.P. Snow I suppose wouldn't be ranked with Joyce; but Joyce couldn't be credited with contributing to science merely because he coined the word "quark". Was G.B. Shaw's preface on evolution in "Back to Methusaleh" a contribution to the evolution of the theory of evolution? Are they any cases of literary people making direct contributions to science? Einstein played the violin--was this a contribution to music? B. Russell wrote a novel, which I haven't found yet--would that count as a bridging of the two cultures? Or, was Russell a worker in both cultures because he (and Whitehead) virtually created symbolic logic and Russell wrote 'traditional' philosophy. These are some of the questions that comprise the two cultures problem, first pinpointed by Snow. Because computers find their main application and market in business does not mean that those who use computers are thereby in the business world. Scientists and engineers use computers, for the most part, as a device for processing complex formulae requiring lots of repetitive calculations of very large fields of data. Though, a recent breakthrough in the field of computera applications is the arrival of computer-aided engineering. CAE systems test and improve electronic circuit designs. Also, sub-nuclear physicists are now using computers to record and decode 'events' that were formerly recorded by photography and decoded by teams of graduate assistants. Moreover, the advent of these systems raises the same problem as does the advent of computer aided teaching systems for professors and students: How do and should we interact with computers that perform intelligent functions, such as designing electronic circuits, and describing physical processes? This problem cuts across cultures, domains, and socio-economic sub-groups. In sum: though people in business, science, and engineering were the first to exploit computers, there is nothing inherently scientific about using computers. Moreover, it is said that computer scientists don't know any programming languages, and if they do they do not program in any case. What they know is the theory of computation and finite mathematics. Would study about these revolutionary topics in the field of mathematics be more relevant to those interested in learning about the evolution or history of human thinking than learning how to code in a particular computer language? From: LOU@VAX1.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: quality or quantity? Date: 13-AUG-1987 16:30:13 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 189 (189) Let me pick up 2 points from S. Richmond: >>>(1) Also, the cognitive functions supported by this process--in so far as word-processing expedites cut-and-paste--are no different than the hardware cut-and-paste. (Scrolling a typed text merely expedites cut-and-paste.) >>>>(2) Is there anything qualitatively new introduced by word processors? Yes- in so far as they are used in conjunction with electronic journals/mail/bulletin boards to produce electronically stored essays, etc., that can be accessed quickly and virtually universally. I think that "merely expediting cut and paste" is a bit of an underselling of what's going on here (both in this document and in general where wp takes root). Without electronic media 'cut-and-paste' is just impractical. And it is also far from invisible. Look at it the other way round: what we lose with wp is all that gorgeous polysemy and confusion that the practice of palimpsest gave us; as I sd, the wp text is always new, always being re-made, as it were re-read. But just supposing you agree that wp is just what we've always done, only a bit better, then proposition (2) above is surely inconsistent? What's the difference between electronic mail and a runner with a cleft stick? just a bit faster and more reliable (well, usually) isn't it? and whoever says e-mail is accessible "universally" really has been blinded by technophoria! let's not kid ourselves: this unique experiment/pastime/time-waster is just one very expensive toy which we happen (by virtue of our unique cultural/ geographic/political privilege) to be able to benefit from. what reason is there for imagining it would ever become as democratic, as universal, a form of communication as the written word? there are quite a few places in europe where the use of xerox copiers is illegal, never mind computer networks, funded by IBM on a temporary basis. I see no evidence at all of "access to intellectual products" ceasing to be contingent on "the luxury of an academic position". Maybe it's different over there. L From: TLG@UCIVMSA Subject: Date: Thu, 13 Aug 87 10:15 PDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 190 (190) The TLG has been awarded a (modest) grant to support the convening of a panel at the December 5-8 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meeting in Boston. In accordance with the granting agency's wishes, the panel will discuss ways to make the TLG's facilities and resources (and partcularly the TLG's biblical and theological texts) more readily accessible to theological institutions and scholars. HUMANIST members with pertinent interests who might wish to participate in the conference at issue should contact me directly. Theodore F. Brunner Director Thesaurus Linguae Graecae University of California Irvine Irvine, CA 92717 Area Code 714 856-6404 From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: quality/quantity Date: Thu, 13-AUG-1987 16:19 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 191 (191) Reply to Lou Burnard's second reply: I don't see any inconsistency between holding that the word processor alone adds nothing new in terms of intellectual power and holding that the word processor in conjunction with telecommunication does add something qualitatively new to intellectual power--at least at the cultural and social level as opposed to the individual level. I am optimistic about the potentiality of electronic media to cross cultural and political boudaries. Thank you for reminding me about the political control over access to even the printed world, not only in Europe, but also in this continent. Do you think those in our paradise of access to this plaything, at the mercy of IBM, can and should take action to open this up to our friends outside these groves? From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 13 August 1987, 17:05:51 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 192 (192) The following is from Nancy Ide. Some error in software caused it to go astray rather than to HUMANIST. From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Response to NEH Funding Request Date: Thursday, 13 August 1987 2050-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 193 (193) In Autumn of 1986, Penn's CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) sought funding from NEH to support its "external services" activity and to move in the direction of creating a consortium of cooperating humanities centers. The proposal was not funded, and the detailed discussion and anonymous referee reports have just reached me from the NEH offices. The issues raised are often predictable -- is it wise to invest in CD-ROM technology, isn't Penn overly bound to the TLG coding and IBYCUS influence, why isn't the proposal more specific about what texts will be put on future CD-ROMs -- but one very important issue is especially worth placing before the HUMANIST audience, and that is Do the Centers Really Want to have a Consortium Arrangement? Clearly, some of the reviewers thought not, or at least not on the terms described in the CCAT proposal. If any HUMANISTS would like copies of the relevant materials, or wish to discuss them, I am at your service. This may help strengthen future proposals, from whatever source. I still think we would profit from more formal "consortial" ties, if someone has the courage to try to coordinate us! Bob Kraft, CCAT, University of Pennsylvania (KRAFT@PENNDRLN) From: R.J.HARE@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Subject: Two cultures Date: 14 Aug 87 09:27:08 bst X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 194 (194) I suppose that strictly speaking, the discussion about 'two cultures' is nothing to do with computing and the humanities, but it's intrinsically interesting and I suppose that the attitudes we have towards the 'two cultures' give a guide to our attitudes towards other matters. If only because of that last fact, the discussion is valuable, so, a couple of observations on the last few exchanges on this topic: I think that the idea of separating direct contributions to the arts|sciences|arts|sciences by scientists|artists|artists|scientists is a mildly dangerous idea in the first place, if only because it tends to reinforce the barriers between scientists and artists. The whole point about the 'two cultures' as far as I am concerned is that it is a myth. There is only one culture. If one accepts that basic thesis, then yes, GBS's introduction to Back to Methusaleh (which I haven't read) *is* an indirect contribution to the evolution of the theory of evolution (or to 'science' or to 'culture'), even if only a tiny one. Whether it's a contribution to Science (with a 'S') is a different matter. Similarly, Einstein's music-making *is* an indirect contribution to music (or the 'arts' or 'culture'), though again, it might not be considered as being a contribution to Music (with a 'M'). Either of these examples might also be considered as having made a direct contribution to our culture if for example, Shaw's introduction sparked off some new ideas in the mind of an evolutionary biologist, or a sequence of notes played by Einstein gave a composer the inspiration for a new work. Both pretty unlikely I admit, but not as far-fetched as one might suppose - I beleive for example that it's common for those 'good' at mathematics to be 'good' at music. Perhaps any psychologists out there could confirm that (slightly hazy) recollection and bring to our attention other correlations between 'artistic' and 'scientific' abilities. Roger Hare. From: LOU@VAX1.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: Date: 14-AUG-1987 10:29:33 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 195 (195) I am currently revising and updating the Text Archive Shortlist/Snapshot in preparation for an exciting new academic year... One of the pages I am overhauling is the one which lists "Other Archives". The purpose of this is simply to list major institutions believed to be sitting on (or know of the whereabouts of) large quantities of machine readable texts. It's obviously not possible to list every place where such things might be found (and will, in any case, when/if the Rutgers MRTH project reaches fruition, be unnecessary) so I've tried to limit it to major, centrally-funded institutions, and (after some thought) have excluded centres which are PRIMARILY 'centres for computing in the humanities' (excepting those whose texts we have in the archive in category X, because this list is a subset of the depositor address list in the archive database). The current count is a paltry 17; I'm sure I must have forgotten some, and there are errors in those I've remembered, so please help if you can. P.S. Maybe this list might be a starting point towards the sort of 'consortion' that Bob Kraft seems to be proposing P.P.S Any responses received after the end of the month will be TOO LATE; any received by the end of next week (20th) will be ON TIME. Lou Burnard OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE 14 Aug 1987 Other Archives Biblical texts Pe Center for Computer Analysis of Texts D Religion U Pennsylvania Philadelphia Pa 19143 USA Dutch Le I.N.L. Postbus 132 Leiden 2300 AC Netherlands English Be International Computer Archive of Modern English EDB-Senter for Humanistisk Forskning U Bergen Boks 53 Bergen-Universitet 5014 Norway French Na Institut Nationale de la Langue Francaise Universite* de Nancy 44 ave de la Libe*ration CO 3310 Nancy-Ce*de*x F 54014 France General Ca Literary & Linguistic Computing Centre U Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA Ox Oxford Text Archive U Oxford Computing Service 13 Banbury Rd Oxford OX2 6NN Ut Humanities Research Center Brigham Young University Provo, Ut. USA German Bo Inst. fur Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik I.K.P. Poppelsdorfer Allee 47 Bonn I D-5300 W. Germany Ma Institut fur Deutsche Sprache Inst. fur Deutsche Sprache Friedrich-Karl Str. 12 Mannheim 1 D-6800 Germany Greek Ir Thesaurus Lingu^a Gr^ac^a U California at Irvine Irvine CA 92717 USA Hebrew BI Bar-Ilan Center for Computers and Jewish Heritage Aliza & Menachem Begin Building Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52100 Israel Je Academy of the Hebrew Language Giv'at Ram P.O. Box 3449 Jerusalem, 91 034 Israel Icelandic Co Arnamagn^an Institute U Copenhagen Njalsgade 76 Copenhagen DK-2300 Denmark Italian Pi Ist. di Linguistica Computazionale U of Pisa via della faggiola Pisa I-56100 Italy Latin Lv Centre e*lectronique de traitement des documents Universite* Catholique de Louvain Louvain la Neuve B-1348 Belgium NH APA Repository of Greek and Latin texts LOGOI Systems 27 School Street Hanover NH 03755 USA Norwegian Bn Norsk Tekstarkiv Boks 53 Bergen-Universitet Bergen 5014 Norway Swedish Go Logotek U Goteborg Sprakdata 6 N. Allegatan Goteborg 41301 Sweden END OF LIST From: S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE Subject: two cultures Date: Fri, 14-AUG-1987 08:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 196 (196) 1 How many cultures? R.Hare's solution or dissolution of the two cultures problem in saying that there is really one culture is one way out of Snow's problem. Nelson Goodman says that really the arts are cognitive in content, but only differ from the sciences in their notational systems. If this is the type of solution that Hare is proposing, there still remains a dimension of Snow's problem that is untouched. Very few scientists and humanists can talk about each other's work together--not only on a professional level, but also on an informal level. They have very little comprehension of the problems, methods, and mores of each other. This is akin to a problem posed earlier by the founder of 'Reconstructionism' in North American modern Judaism. M. Kaplan asked -- how can the contemporary Jew live as a Jew in modern western civilization? There are two 'civilizations' that the modern Jew inhabits: one is the traditional Jewish civilization steeped in the Bible, and Rabbinic interpretation and law; the other is modern western civilization steeped in an extended version of the Bible and in Greco-Roman mores and values. The literature, the mores, and the institutions of these two civilizations, not only are different but conflict in certain respects. Analogously, the modern humanist is educated in a distinctive tradition with distinctive mores and problems; however, the humanist lives in a world dominated by the scientific culture. How can the humanist live as a humanist in modern scientific civilization? 2 Are the two cultures becoming one? Perhaps N. Ide's obversation that textual analysis and literary criticism is converging with A.I. on the problem of understanding meaning--of how to decode texts and strings--indicates that the two cultures are converging. This reminds me of Karl Popper's remark that really there is only one problem that all thinkers, scientists, philosophers, historians... are interested in: namely, what is our place in this universe of random events?; and his remark that what really matters are pursuit of problems regardless of academic discipline. However, in spite of this, should we ignore the fact that the focus of the A.I. world and the literary criticism world on the problem of explaining how meaning occurs and how meaning can be obtained, differs? The A.I world is interested in simulating the process of meaning. The textual analysis world is interested in the meaning of particular texts, of decoding texts found in different periods of history. Isn't this one of the crucial differences in values between the sciences and humanities? The sciences are interested in process just as process; the humanities are interested in process in so far as it helps one to approach the understanding of unique products and unique events in human history. From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Archives Date: Friday, 14 August 1987 1020-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 197 (197) Since this may be of more general interest, here are a couple of corrections and comments on Lou Burnard's list of Archives: 1. The address for "Pe" = CCAT needs to be corrected as follows: Religious Studies (this is optional; CCAT will do) Box 36 College Hall U Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104-6303 USA 2. The Pe archive focuses on biblical materials, but includes much more since we have tried to gather a variety of texts from other sources (as the CD-ROM "text sampler" contents indicate). Probably the "General" category would be appropriate, perhaps with the comment "special focus on biblical and related materials." 3. The APA Archive has now moved with Stephen Waite to the new Packard Humanities Institute (which Waite now directs) 300 Second Street Los Altos, CA (I need to get the zipcode for Lou) USA 415 948-0150 (Bitnet account not yet established) This Institute (PHI) will have more than only Latin (and Greek) texts, although the initial concentration is on producing a Thesaurus Linguae Latinae parallel to TLG. Bob Kraft From: Willard McCarty Subject: Scholarly computing in the humanities? Date: 16 August 1987, 14:00:09 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 198 (198) My question about the scholarly nature of humanities computing, recently addressed by Abigail Young and Nancy Ide, leads almost immediately to the more general question of what humanistic scholarship is, or what we think it is. Popular culture is still permeated with the simplistic notion of progress, which in practice is much more congenial to the sciences than it is to the humanities. A scientist's career often hinges on whether he is the first to announce a new discovery, and if he does the rewards can be enormous. He is much more likely to capture the public imagination than the humanist. The humanist's discoveries, or rediscoveries, are both more remote and more immediate to daily life, therefore harder to see: either because cultural self-understanding is difficult to achieve and its effects profound and gradual, or because they touch intimately aspects of life that are routinely ignored though utterly inescapable. Fruit of the scientist's work is often marketable, at least in theory, whereas the humanist's work is not. In an age dominated by the "ethic" of the marketplace, it follows that the humanist is bound to do poorly. If forced to sell himself, he will be forced to sell himself. Now I'm not saying that scientists are crass and humanists noble (I'd be absolutely *overwhelmed* by evidence to the contrary!), but that the public perception of their roles creates a bad situation for the scholar of either kind. I've heard scientists, including our recent Nobel Prize winner John Polanyi, complain about how highly touted work has been conducted in spite of the demands of the marketplace and academic salesmen and about the ways in which directions of research have been disturbingly altered by the pressure of granting agencies. This is no new situation, but that doesn't make it any the less of a threat. As computing humanists we're caught in the middle, but in an important sense not between two opposed scholarly communities. Like the scientists we need money for equipment, but we are very new to the game of how to get it without becoming slavish creatures of the marketplace, thus of the lowest common denominator of public opinion. Our role is Socratic, but how do we avoid the hemlock? Watch out for those who would demolish tenure. Progress (which sells because it holds out a soporific hope) is not our most important product or aim. We don't so much go where no man has gone before but continually return to basic questions. So a humanities computing that furnishes us with tools to do what the best of us have always done, but do it more efficiently, indeed do it at all, is a discipline worth following. As Nancy Ide has said or implied, one important effect of humanities computing is to subject formerly intuitive methods to algorithmic scrutiny, so to make conscious some of what has been subconscious. I don't think that means our results will be either less tentative or less imaginative, but it does mean that we may know ourselves as scholars better. The danger from within is that as champions of the observable phenomena from which algorithms are constructed we will lose sight of the unobservable and so trivialize our disciplines. The danger from without is that like Esau we will sell our birthright for a bowl of yummy pottage. On the other hand, the potential of humanities computing both for the humanities *and* for computer science is very great and very exciting. I hope this is not too woolly for HUMANISTs at large. I do think we're in a good position to trouble ourselves and our colleagues with gritty questions about basic issues. Very few others seem to be doing it. From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: McCarty on Scholarship, Pottage, etc. Date: Mon, 17 Aug 87 17:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 199 (199) Bring on the grits! But first, perhaps, a little of the nitty. Does anyone remember an explanation of why the BIOGRAFY file is being spruced up for publication in the ACH journal? Does it make spicy reading? Is it representative of the latest algorithmic pulse of the high-tech humanists of our time? Does it help, or hinder, the free exchange so natural in this new medium to know that sooner or later, all our vital statistics and perhaps even some of our knottier comments will be grabbed off to fill the (otherwise uncrowded?) pages of some institutional organ or other? Will it help raise funds for this enterprise, or simply build an image, and distribute a useful free mailing list, for those otherwise not well enough occupied with (dare one utter the word?) their own (algorithmic or other) scholarly pursuits? Doubtless none of the above suspicions have any foundation in fact. Then why not a brief rationale for jumping into print so soon to advertise who the early joiners of HUMANIST happen to be? Behind all this flippancy lurks another question, really quite a sincere one, stemming from genuine ignorance and wishful optimism. THat is, does anyone feel able to outline some of the new wrinkles in textual studies or other branches of humanities research that but for ubiquitous computerization would not, could not, have existed, and why we would all have been the poorer for it? I don't really begrudge the premise, if indeed it's true. But the first few instances that did come to my mind turned out to be pretty quickly traceable to scholars or practices already known to be under way without computers. I for one would welcome some facts to bolster this argument for computers in the humanities, next time I too am tempted to advance it. --Sterling Beckwith From: Willard McCarty Subject: Junk on the rebound from wiscvm Date: 17 August 1987, 19:23:36 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 200 (200) A temporarily bad address on the ARPA network, in collusion with crude software on a VM-machine in Wisconsin, has resulted in a small flood of junk mail for HUMANISTs. Brute-force methods have been applied to stop additional junk from landing in your readers. Your friendly anthropomorphic peripheral interface extends the necessary apologies. From: Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 Subject: Date: 18 August 1987, 10:13:11 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 201 (201) Do any HUMANISTS know of a text archive with medieval Latin exegetical texts in machine readable form, eg, Alcuin, Bede, Rupert of Deutz, Thomas Aquinas, etc? Or even patristic exegetical texts? I have tried communicating with CETEDOC at Louvain and haven't had a reply on this point. I am interesting in analyzing one of the perennial problems in the history of western biblical commentaries, the so-called senses of Scripture, by using computer analysis but need texts! Any replies should, I think, be sent direct to me, rather than posted to HUMANIST generally. Thank you. Abigail Ann Young University of Toronto YOUNG at UTOREPAS From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: textual studies Date: Tuesday, 18 August 1987 1056-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 202 (202) No punches pulled. I was a bit put off by the tone of Sterling Beckwith's comments on the plan to publish the brief biographies. I, for one, find this sort of information very helpful for seeking advice, writing grant proposals (and suggesting possible referees), and referring information seekers, to mention only some obvious uses. Maybe it wouldn't need to be published, but there are many people out there who are not on e-mail and who might find it useful. So do it. As for the "new" advantages of computer assisted textual studies, we at CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) have found many. The CATSS (Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Study) project out of which CCAT to some extent has emerged is able to do careful and complete study of "translation technique" (e.g. between the Hebrew and Greek biblical materials, or Greek and Latin, or Greek and Coptic) at a level that is theoretically possible without computer, but would hardly have been attempted. We are also engaged in encoding all available textual variants from the hundreds of ancient manuscripts for the Greek Bible to enable complete analysis and production of data in various forms to assist the creation of new critical editions. Again, theoretically possible otherwise, but not likely to be done at this level. We have done semi-automatic morphological analysis of some of these materials, and will coordinate the various elements (text, analysis, variants, translation alignment) in such a way as to afford gigantic leaps forward in philological, textcritical, cultural-linguistic, and (hopefully) historical research. Although we are just beginning to look ahead to next stages, with the growing availability of large bodies of such data on CD-ROM, it is clear to us that digitization combined with character oriented data will put such studies as paleography, papyrology and codicology on new bases that could hardly be accomplished more than sporadically with pre-computer technology (e.g. precise mapping of handwritten letterforms, and careful comparison of such; "fingerprinting" of papyri striations to help match fragments; shadowing and enhancement techniques to assist with reading palimpsests or badly damaged materials). Much of this can, of course, overflow into basic instructional approaches (especially when combined with sound and pictures/pictorial graphics) and/or general enhancement of the use of texts for whatever reasons -- e.g. being able to browse a text in a "foreign language" (or even in one's native tongue) and call into a window a lexical entry to assist with meaning, and (in another window) a grammatical analysis, or even translation equivalents in other languages (and, for that matter, variants). Sure, it could all be done without computer in some theoretical sense, but certainly not as quickly, conveniently, thoroughly, etc. Some would call all this "drugery." Perhaps so. But it is foundational to other applications, and I would certainly be "poorer" in my own work (on Jewish and Christian literature and history in the Greco-Roman period) without it! I suspect that similar things could be said about text dependent research in general. Bob Kraft (CCAT) From: CHURCHDM@VUCTRVAX Subject: HUMANITIES BULLETIN BOARD Date: Wed, 19 Aug 87 12:56 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 203 (203) Frank Borchardt at Duke told me I should get on your bulletin board. Please send me a message telling when the board is accessible and how I can get on it and use it through BITNET. Thanks, Dan M. Church, Dep't of French & Italian, Vanderbilt University From: Steve Younker - Postmaster Subject: Humanist Test Date: Wed, 19 Aug 87 14:49:10 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 204 (204) I trust all the people on the HUMANIST subscription will excuse this short test message. Steve Younker, Postmaster - University of Toronto Postmaster - HUMANIST From: Willard McCarty Subject: The biographies in print? Date: 19 August 1987, 15:59:38 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 205 (205) Nancy Ide's proposal to print the biographies, recently endorsed by Bob Kraft, has created a minor flurry of comments and caused a fair number of revisions to be made. It's fascinating and significant that several HUMANISTs have felt compelled to take the expansive and playful elements out of their biographies, as it were to put them in their Sabbath best for presentation to company. I find in this ample justification for an electronic forum, where homo ludens is as much at home as homo sapiens (though those two are, of course, aspects of each other). The motivation for printing the biographies seems to me a good one. Ide and Kraft have both suggested that those of us who don't yet have access to e-mail might profit from reading them as much as we will. On the other hand, many of you wrote yours not suspecting that they would be published in any fashion. So, I leave the matter with you. If anyone wants to discuss this in public, please do so. If you merely want your biography deleted from the collection to be printed, please send me a note directly; if you want a revised version printed, send me the revision. I'm not yet certain of the Newsletter's deadline but will let you know. From: Willard McCarty Subject: An introductory guide to HUMANIST Date: 19 August 1987, 20:55:32 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 206 (206) Following is a revised welcome message, expanded to such an extent that I'm now calling it *A Guide to HUMANIST*. I'd be grateful if you would send me any comments or suggestions for improvement. One shortcoming I'm especially conscious of is its "monolingual" preoccupation with Bitnet e-mail. Help from anyone familiar with the workings of other networks now used by HUMANISTs (e.g., JANET, uucp, ARPA) would be very welcome. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A Guide to HUMANIST +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ C O N T E N T S I. Nature and Aims II. How to use HUMANIST A. Sending and receiving messages B. Conventions and Etiquette C. Distributing files D. ListServ's commands and facilities E. Suggestions and Complaints From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 207 (207) I. Nature and aims From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 208 (208) Welcome to HUMANIST, a Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN discussion group for people who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review software, answer questions, give advice, program, write documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this area are included. Although HUMANIST is intended to help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is primarily meant for discussion rather than publication or advertisement. HUMANIST is an activity of the Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources, which is in turn an affiliate of both the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Although participants in HUMANIST are not required to be members of either organization, membership in them is highly recommended. In general, HUMANISTs are encouraged to ask questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards. Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly different from the support of other kinds of computing, with which it may be confused. It does not fit easily into the established categories of academia and is not well understood by those from whom recognition is sought. Apart from the general discussion, HUMANIST encourages the formation of a professional identity by maintaining an informal biographical directory of its members. This directory is automatically sent to new members when they join. Supplements are issued whenever warranted by the number of new entries. Members are responsible for keeping their entries updated. The directory and its supplements may be printed in the Newsletter of the ACH unless individuals declare otherwise. Those from any discipline in or related to the humanities are welcome, provided that they fit the broad guidelines described above. Please tell anyone who might be interested to send a message to me, giving his or her name, address, telephone number, and a short biographical description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. This description should cover academic background and research interests, both in computing and otherwise; the nature of the job this person holds; and, if relevant, its place in the university. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 209 (209) II. How to Use HUMANIST From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 210 (210) A. Sending and receiving messages ----------------------------------------------------------------- Currently anyone given access to HUMANIST can communicate with all other members without restriction. A member need not be on Bitnet but can use any comparable network with access to Bitnet. Thus, to send mail to everyone simultaneously, use whatever command your system provides (e.g., NOTE or MAIL) addressed to HUMANIST at UTORONTO. Your message is then sent by your local software to the UTORONTO node of Bitnet, where the "Revised List Processor" (or ListServ) automatically redirects it to everyone currently on the list of members. Because ListServ is automatic, HUMANIST is subject to inadvertent abuse, and a certain amount of "junk mail" is inevitable. With the number of members world-wide, using many different systems on several different networks, the possibilities for error are not inconsiderable. Membership in HUMANIST thus requires patience with fallible human artifacts and regular attention to one's incoming e-mail. Otherwise the accumulation can be burdensome. [Please note that in the following description, commands will be given in the form acceptable on an IBM VM/CMS system. If your system is different, you will have to make the appropriate translation.] ----------------------------------------------------------------- B. Conventions and Etiquette ----------------------------------------------------------------- Restricted conversations or asides can, of course, develop from the unrestricted discussions on HUMANIST by members communicating directly with each other. This is particularly recommended for replies to general queries, so that HUMANIST and its members are not burdened with messages of interest only to the person who asked the question and, perhaps, a few others. If, for example, one of us asks the rest about the availability of software for keeping notes in Devanagari, suggestions should be sent directly to the questioner's e-mail address, not to HUMANIST. A questioner who receives one or more generally interesting and useful replies should consider gathering them together with the original question and submitting the collection to HUMANIST. (Please note that the REPLY function of some electronic mailers will automatically direct a user's response to HUMANIST, not to the original sender. Thus REPLY should be avoided in many cases. This is particularly true for systems that allow automatic replies, for example, in cases in which the user is temporarily unable to attend to his account.) Use your judgment about what the whole group should receive. We could easily overwhelm each other and so defeat the purpose of HUMANIST. Strong methods are available for controlling a discussion group, but the lively, free-ranging discussions made possible by judicious self-control seem preferable. Controversy itself is welcome, but what others would regard as tiresome junk-mail is not. Courtesy is still a treasured virtue. Make it an invariable practice to help the recipients of your messages scan them by including a SUBJECT line in your message. Be aware, however, that some people will read no more than the SUBJECT line, so you should take care that it is accurate and comprehensive as well as brief. Use your judgment about the length of your messages as well. If you find yourself writing an essay or have a substantial amount of information to offer, it might be better to follow one of the two methods outlined in the next section. ----------------------------------------------------------------- C. Distributing files ----------------------------------------------------------------- HUMANIST offers us an excellent means of distributing written material of many kinds, e.g., reviews of software or hardware. (Work is now underway to provide this service for reviews.) Although conventional journals remain the means of professional recognition, they are often too slow to keep up with changes in computing. With some care, HUMANIST could provide a supplementary venue of immediate benefit to our colleagues. There are two possible methods of distributing such material. More specialized reports should probably be reduced to abstracts and posted in this form to HUMANISTs at large, then sent by the originators directly to those who request them. The more generally interesting material in bulk can be sent in an ordinary message to all HUMANISTs, but this could easily overburden the network so is not generally recommended. We are currently working on a means of centralized storage for relatively large files, such that they could be fetched by HUMANISTs at will, but this means is not yet fully operational. At present the only files we are able to keep centrally are the monthly logbooks of conversations on HUMANIST. See the next section for details. ----------------------------------------------------------------- D. ListServ's Commands and Facilities ----------------------------------------------------------------- As just mentioned, ListServ maintains monthly logbooks of discussions. Thus new members have the opportunity of reading contributions made prior to joining the group. To see a list of these logbooks, send the following command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME HUMANIST FILELIST (Note that in networks that do not allow interactive commands to be given to a Bitnet ListServ, the same thing can be accomplished be sending a message to HUMANIST with the command as the first and only line. This will result in junk-mail for everyone else, but so be it.) The logbooks are named HUMANIST LOGyymm, where "yy" represents the last two digits of the year and "mm" the number of the month. The log for July 1987 would, for example, be named HUMANIST LOG8707, and to get this log you would issue the following command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET HUMANIST LOG8705 ListServ accepts several other commands, for example to retrieve a list of the current members or to set various options. These are described in a document named LISTSERV MEMO. This and other documentation will normally be available to you from your nearest ListServ node and is best fetched from there, since in that way the network is least burdened. You should consult with your local experts to discover the nearest ListServ; they will also be able to help you with whatever problems in the use of ListServ you may encounter. Once you have found the nearest node XXXXXX, type the following: TELL LISTSERV AT XXXXXX INFO ? The various documents available to you will then be listed. ----------------------------------------------------------------- E. Suggestions and Complaints ----------------------------------------------------------------- Suggestions about the running of HUMANIST or its possible relation to other means of communication are very welcome. So are complaints, particularly if they are constructive. Experience has shown that an electronic discussion group can be either beneficial or burdensome to its members. Much depends on what the group as a whole wants and does not want. Please make your views known, to everyone or to me directly, as appropriate. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Willard McCarty, 20 August 1987 Editor of HUMANIST, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: why not wait until the questionnaire? Date: Wed, 19 Aug 87 23:26 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 211 (211) Good the motives may well be, but what are they? Does one join an electronic conference just to provide tantalizing tidbits for those who do NOT have access to e-mail? This is only one of many confusing and seemingly contradictory aspects of the proposal to put personal identifying information from the early stage of this particular new electronic conference into a print journal that serves a different membership and a different (albeit somewhat overlapping) function. The issues about the difference between print and electronic media raised so delicately by McCarty seem no less critical. Without much better explanations than have so far been supplied, would it not make sense to keep these issues going as proper food for our discussion, while awaiting some kind of standardized questionnaire, which I gather is already in the works, before going public with our personal data? Better yet, such a format might well produce just the sort of machine-readable material about ourselves that could (who knows?) one day power yet another "giant leap forward" for the computerized humanities! S. Beckwith (who would include a digitized passport photo with each bio) From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Why not wait for the questionnaire? Date: Wed, 19 Aug 87 23:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 212 (212) (REPLY to W. McCarty re printing bios) Good the motives may well be, but what are they? Does one join an electronic conference just to provide tantalizing tidbits for those who do NOT have access to e-mail? This is only one of many confusing and seemingly contradictory aspects of the proposal to put personal identifying information from the early stage of this particular new electronic conference into a print journal that serves a different membership and a different (albeit somewhat overlapping) function. The issues about the difference between print and electronic media raised so delicately by McCarty seem no less critical. Without much better reasons for haste than have so far been supplied, would it not make sense to kee p these issues going as proper food for our discussion, while awaiting some kind of standardized questionnaire, which I gather is already in the works, before going public with our personal data? Better yet, such a format might well produce just the sort of machine-readable material about ourselves that could (who knows?) one day power yet another "giant leap forward" for the computerized humanities! -- S. Beckwith (who would include a digitized passport photo with each bio...) From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: microform scanning Date: Thursday, 20 August 1987 0952-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 213 (213) Does anyone have information about scanners capable of converting microfilm and/or microfiche images directly into electronic form (without going through a hardcopy stage)? I have heard that such things exist, but have never found an address or telephone number to contact for details. Bob Kraft From: Willard McCarty dartvax!psc90!jdg@ihnp4 (Dr. Joel Goldfield) Subject: Joel Goldfield on new things under the sun Date: 22 August 1987, 17:03:01 EDTThu, 20 Aug 87 17:01:54 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 214 (214) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues, I appreciate Willard's having sent on Abigail Young's thoughtful comments on humanities computing. My apologies to Willard for his having to forward this comment since my gateway/node to BITNET is somewhat dyslexic. Abigail and others may find the upcoming book of essays edited by Rosanne Potter (probably to be published by U. of Pennsylvania Press) to be useful in determining whether the computer lets us do "something new." This volume will consist of approximately one dozen essays, scholarly "eggs" containing a variety of literary applications (English, French, German, etc.) of computer research. They are probably on that "cutting edge" which we should consider in our humanities computing repertoire before coming to an initial decision on whether of not this "newness" exists. Personally, I find that if the process is new and speeds up my research, thus the amount of information I can evaluate and incorporate in my literary analyses, it is a valuable addition to my work. Often, speed with accuracy in research allows us to discover and evaluate more efficiently. The results I obtain seem richer and more accurate in substantiating the "big picture" as well as "trees in the forest" conclusions for which I strive. Sincerely, Joel D. Goldfield Plymouth State College (NH, USA) From: ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: 23 August 1987, 20:25:59 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 215 (215) I have to second Joel's recent comment: the increase in speed and accuracy is a principle advantage of computer-assisted humanities research. Helping us to do faster and more accurately the things that we already do is a definite advantage of the new technology. The "cutting edge", however, is a different matter. I think of the renaissance astronomers with their "new technology" and look at the results. The ones who reshaped the world weren't those who simply used the technology to help them to do what they already did; the ones who reshaped the world were those who used the technology to do -- and to discover -- things that had not been done -- or discovered -- by doing things the way they had been done in the past. The real contributions of computer technology to humanities research are only going to appear when we begin to use the tool to do things we haven't been able to do before, either because they were too time-consuming or labour-intensive -- as someone already has suggested in these discussions -- or because we have not been able, until now, to conceive of them. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Renaissance astronomers & Renaissance poets Date: 23 August 1987, 20:57:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 216 (216) Stuart Hunter has replied to the continuing discussion on humanities computing by citing the example of Renaissance astronomers, who shook up the old world with new discoveries. The problem with this analogy to our use of computers lies mostly (here it is once more!) with the practical differences between the conduct of the sciences and of the humanities. Galileo and company were scientists, very much interested in going where no man had gone before. We, however, are much closer to Milton, who may have visited Galileo in his pontifical confinement and who wrote him into Paradise Lost. Milton apparently had read everything ancient and modern by the time of his blindness, was very much aware of contemporary discoveries of all sorts, yet he turned these discoveries to the eternal problems explored in his poetry. Critics have been puzzled by the odd mixture of Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy in PL, but the puzzle vanishes as soon as you realize that both were equally grist for his mill, that as a poet he wasn't espousing one astronomy or the other as the "truth" but using both as metaphors. With Joel Goldfield I'm also looking forward to the publication of Rosanne Potter's book with its several examples. Meanwhile, what seems to have come out in this discussion are two suggestions: (1) that it's too early to tell what the scholarly contribution of humanities computing may be; and (2) that h.c. has already established itself in the scholarly world by allowing us to do things that were theoretically possible before but would not have been done very thoroughly or at all because they were so laborious. Both seem true to me. In my own work (on the classical antecedents to Milton) it certainly seems that by using a computer to collect and arrange thousands of extracts from classical texts I've been able to do things otherwise beyond my powers. This brings up a corollary to the second point just mentioned. There are and have been classicists capable of recalling and arranging such extracts without a computer, but they were not Miltonists as well. So, by using a computer I've been able to wander far beyond the limits that would otherwise constrain me and thus to do (I flatter myself to think) exciting work. At least the work excites me, and some of it gets published. To generalize, then, computational methods favour cross-disciplinary research. For another, simpler example, take the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a great thesaurus indeed. Using it, say on an Ibycus microcomputer, someone with a rudimentary knowledge of Greek can do things utterly impractical if not unthinkable without it. Of course the thinking still has to be done, but the TLG gives us a wealth of material to think with. The same (and more) could be said of the Responsa database of rabbinic Hebrew, a 70-million word corpus covering a millenium, because of its wonderful tools for morphological analysis. Am I wrong to presume that the aim of philology and textual editing is to provide reliable texts on which we can base interpretations of the past and its culture? Could our parallel aim be to provide various reliable ways of manipulating these texts? Our case is somewhat different, since to a much greater extent we must also be interpreters. [65 lines] From: ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: 24 August 1987, 10:29:26 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 217 (217) Willard puts his finger on the nub of the problem when he asks, in his final comment: "Could our parallel aim be to provide various reliable ways of manipulating these texts? Our case is somewhat different, since to a much greater extent we must also be interpreters." To clarify the place of computing in the humanities we have to begin, I would argue, with a clear idea of what it is that we in the humanities are trying to do. If the aim of textual editing and of philology is "to provide reliable texts on which we can base interpretations of the past and its culture" then the place of computing can be viewed as that of a tool that aids one in the process of compiling the texts, comparing the variants, and, ultimately, producing the final product, the "reliable texts." In this it is clear that the philologist and editor are using the technology to do better and to do faster the things that they have always done -- or tried to do. What, though, is the broader aim of the literary scholar? To use Willard's description of his work on Milton as an example, exactly what is it that he is trying to do? If his task is simply "to collect and arrange thousands of extracts from classical texts," then again the computer becomes a tool that enables us to do things better and faster. Willard goes on, though, to point toward the more difficult problem when he says, at the end of his note, that "Our case is somewhat different, since to a much greater extent we must also be interpreters." The question that has to be addressed, it seems, is how, to what extent, in what ways, can the technology assist us in the task of interpretation? In order to answer that question, we need to begin from a clear idea of the process of interpretation. Exactly what do we do when we "interpret" a text? What kinds of questions do we ask? What kinds of mental processes are involved? How can those processes be duplicated by computer programmes? Hopefully Roxanne's collection of essays will include not only the "look at how I've been able to speed up my work" kind of paper but also the "this is the goal of my scholarship and this is the process used to reach that goal" kind of paper, the latter being clearly focussed on the process AS RELATED TO THE GOAL. From: Mark Olsen ATMKO at ASUACAD Mark Olsen Subject: Vanilla SNOBOL4 Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 09:37:19 MST24 August 1987, 08:38:59 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 218 (218) Catspaw Inc. has recently released a public domain version of SNOBOL4+ called Vanilla SNOBOL4. It is a stripped down version of SNOBOL4+ that can address 30 kilobytes of program and data space, does not support extended features of the language, but conforms to the so-called "Green Book" SNOBOL4 standard. The package also has a 150 page manual on disk. Catspaw has attempted to provide a usable product while leaving enough out of the PD version to encourage users to purchase the full implementation. Vanilla SNOBOL4 may be very useful for teaching students SNOBOL programming on a micro without purchasing a site license or multiple copies of the program. You can order copies from Catspaw directly (I believe there is a $15.00 charge for shipping, copy and diskette) or send me a formatted 5.25 inch IBM-PC floppy diskette and a self-addressed, stamped diskette mailer, and I will send a copy to you. Catspaw can be contacted at: Catspaw, Inc. P.O. Box 1123 Salida, Colorado 81201 USA (303-539-3884) (emmer@arizona.edu) I can be contacted at: Humanities Computing Facility Department of English Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287 Mark Olsen *** end of message *** From: Mark Olsen Subject: Do you have....? Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 12:10:19 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 219 (219) I have had several requests for the following texts from faculty at Arizona State University: Milton's Paradise Lost, Erasmus Praise of Follow and More's Utopia. We are prepared to scan these, but I certain like to avoid having to scan something that long. I would like to know if these texts are in computer readable format and, if so, what it would cost to obtain copies. Thanks, Mark Olsen From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: interpretation Date: Monday, 24 August 1987 1920-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 220 (220) If, as I would argue, the PRIMARY task of interpretation is to try to understand the target text/author on its own terms (philologically, lexically, historically, etc.), then the use of computer as a fast and accurate tool to recover or uncover relevant data and its use as an aide to interpretation are two sides of the same coin -- or maybe two facets of the same gem -- not so? If it can take us farther (but in what directions, and why?), that would be a bonus. But just as before (or without) the machine, so with the machine, awareness of our own assumptions and aims is probably the most important factor in assessing how we do the job, and how well we do the job. Is "science" really so different? Das Wesens des Wissenschaft ist Methode (Paul de Lagarde; with apologies if I fractured the Deutsch -- "The essence of scholarly research is its method"). Bob Kraft From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: "Are these texts to be had in machine-readable form?" Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 20:17 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 221 (221) A Code of Computer Ethics, if it existed or could be cajoled into being by HUMANISTs, might specify that anyone who scans (or hires third-world slave labor to encode) a complete literary text MUST send word of its existence and whereabouts in such a format to some central, on-line clearing-house or bulletin-board (ACH? HUMANIST itself?) Who is now working on THAT bit of publishity or grantswomanship, one wonders??? Surely Mr. Olsen and others unnumberable would bless and thank them often. Or so it seems to S. Beckwith From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: centralized information on texts Date: Monday, 24 August 1987 2027-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 222 (222) Surely most HUMANISTS know how to start locating available texts. The most obvious and extensive general collection in the English speaking world (probably in the world at large) is the Oxford Archive, the catalogue of which can be obtained via electronic mail from Lou Burnard. The Rutgers Inventory Project has been gathering information about encoded texts for years, and will circulate whatever results are currently available. Rutgers has not attempted to gather all the texts at this point. The Center for Computer Analysis of Texts at Penn has tried to gather texts, has applied for funding to do so (with mixed results), and is putting what has been gathered thus far onto a CD-ROM for distribution this Fall. Milton's Paradise Lost is among those texts. My earlier query about cooperation and consortial arrangements is directly relevant to this issue of information and availability. I am astounded that only three responses from HUMANISTS were received, and I wonder who has any real interest in such matters? Must we continue the humanistic tradition of isolated individualism in this time of new opportunity? Get a form from Rutgers to register the text you have encoded. Send it to Oxford and/or CCAT if you are willing to make it available (even with conditions) to others, or to another cooperating center -- Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for Greek materials (U.Cal, Irvine; Theodore Brunner), Thesaurus Linguae Latinae for (classical) Latin (Packard Humanities Institute; Stephen Waite), ARTFL for French (Univ. of Chicago; Robert Morrissey), etc. (with apologies to the collectors or collections I've overlooked -- speak up so we all know what you are doing!). And say something if you think this is an important function for cooperation/coordination, and for seeking funding collectively. Bob Kraft From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: I knew it! Let MRTH abound! Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 21:11 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 223 (223) There HAD to be something of the sort already up and running, and in going over old HUMANIST mail, I see mention of a Rutgers MRTH Project, the acronym for which even I can decipher. Now can anyone lead me gently by the nose to more information about this happy endeavor? With thanks, S. Beckwith From: ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: 24 August 1987, 23:18:04 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 224 (224) I don't have my OTA file on my home machine, but if Oxford does not have either the Erasmus or the More, you might try contacting George Logan at Queens for the More. From: LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: text archive catalogue Date: 25-AUG-1987 11:05:27 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 225 (225) The new edition of the Oxford Text Archive catalogue is now available on request. It lists over a thousand different texts, many of which are available from Oxford. It includes information supplied by CCAT at Penn, BYU, the ILC at Pisa and the LLC at Cambridge as well as over a dozen contact addresses for other Archives. I would be delighted to send a copy somewhere everyone could get at it, if someone would tell me where! (Particularly since we are currently undergoing the trauma of instlling a new VAX system at Oxford, and our PSE - i.e. the magic gadget that links us to the rest of the world - has chosen this week to go on the blink) In response to St. Beckwith: (1) the MRTH project is still going on collecting detailed cataloguing information about machine readable texts. These will (I believe) eventually be made available over RLIN. It is also planned to publish the current state of their file as part of Joe Raben's forthcoming "Electronic Scholars Resource Guide". They supplied us (OTA) some time ago with paper copies of some of their records; these are unfortunately not in our catalogue because I couldnt face the thought of typing it all in by hand when there was at least a faint chance they might have the sense to send us a machine readable list one day. Mea culpa! (2) I endorse everything everyone has to say about telling the rest of the world what they're doing/preparing. I do my best! If you deposit a text in the Text Archive you can be sure that (a) its availabiltiy will be as widely circulated as possible (b) any copies made of it will be recorded. If you want to know who's worked with machine readable texts of what we can tell you. I get roughly 20 enquiries a month, and have other jobs to do as well, so bear with me... We have copies of two of the three texts requested, by the way... Lou Burnard From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster Subject: Text archiving, data sharing Date: 25 August 1987 12:15:48 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 226 (226) I'd like to second all the admirable sentiments expressed by HUMANISTs recently about the registration of texts and above all about the sharing of texts. It seems a shame to me that there is no central facility in the U.S. comparable to the Oxford archive, to take at least some of the burden off Lou Burnard's shoulders. But it seems an even bigger shame that it is not regarded as a matter of course to deposit texts with OTA or some other archive (perhaps with all the archives that collect in the relevant field), as soon as they are in a presentable state. There are, I'm sure, a lot of reasons that this doesn't always happen now: ignorance, the belief that a given text isn't yet clean enough to make public, fear of being taken advantage of, and more. My proposals toward a set of principles for making, sharing, and using machine-readable texts would include: 1 if you make a machine-readable text, deposit it with an archive, whether you wish to share it right away or not. After you die or retire, you won't care anymore, and the archive should have it then. 2 make the text available to others (i.e. give the archive permission to distribute it). The archive should be willing either to keep the originator of the machine-readable version of the text informed of copies distributed, or to require borrowers to get prior permission from the originator, at the originator's option. (Oxford does this.) That way you can keep track of who is using the text, and if you have a suspicious nature you can even quiz them on their motives before giving permission to borrow it. You can also reserve the data for your own use for a while, until you have got your analysis well underway and don't fear being 'scooped' with your own data. (Personally I think this fear unrealistic -- the number of people in a position to produce quick printable results from a machine-readable text must be so small as to make the chances negligible. Still, I have heard this fear from several people.) 3 Machine-readable copies of texts should be in a documented encoding scheme (ACH is working on developing one of these, and comments from interested parties may be addressed to the undersigned) and include in the file itself (so it's still there even after the paper documentation is lost) the relevant information: who wrote the text, its title and date, bibliographic reference to the edition used as copy text, who made the machine-readable version, where, and when. Archives may wish to insert additionally their names and any revisions or re-formatting they have done. 4 When you use a machine-readable text, BOTH the originator of the data and the distributor (eg a text archive) should be given credit in a footnote, just as you would give credit to the editor and publisher whose edition of Shakespeare you were using. This is established practice in the social sciences (I am told), and has done a little bit to make people willing to publish their datasets. (Not enough, but a little.) 5 All of us should begin to discuss just how we want to go about setting up some central facility or network of central facilities to handle the collection, documentation, and eventual improvement and standardisation of data. It seems pretty clear that it's too expensive a task for individual schools to handle alone, so a consortium seems like a good plan. The details need a lot of discussion, but it seems to me the consortium will have to be self-supporting, -- so we will need to find ways of making it cheaper for schools to join the group than for them to avoid joining. I have a number of ideas on this, but will save them for another note. This is already long enough. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago PS MRTH = Machine-Readable Texts in the Humanities. Look in the usual bibliographies for papers by Marianne Gaunt of Rutgers. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Method, Interpretation, and Humanities Computing Date: 25 August 1987, 22:22:39 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 227 (227) It seems to me that Bob Kraft and Stuart Hunter have both identified something central to scholarship in our field. Kraft, you'll recall, pointed to the importance of method in all scholarship, and Hunter to the question of exactly how interpretation is done, what steps are followed. In doing my own work, a fair bit of which is now computerized, I've spent some effort observing what I do and asking myself what aspects of it are susceptible to computational methods. In doing this I've noted (as I'm sure many others have) how utterly dependent the programs that result from this kind of observation are on whatever literary critical, historiographical, or other theories the observer may hold. Bringing these into the light is, I think, usually a healthy thing, though not necessarily pleasant. (Does the Emperor have any clothes on? If he ostentatiously reads Greek in the Bodleian he probably doesn't.) If, as it seems to me, computational scholarship in the humanities tends to reveal the theoretical bases of interpretation, then we have a natural affinity for the study of criticism, historiography, and, in general, semiotics. As some of you doubtless know better than I, computational methods allow the semiotician to construct and improve upon models of interpretation. Others of us (like me) are content to computerize the observable aspects of our favourite methods because our interests really lie elsewhere, with the texts themselves & the hermeneutical act rather than theories of how texts are read. Computing in the humanities seems to be where many things meet. I continue to think that it is vital for this discipline to be practiced by people with independent scholarly interests. Like comparative literature, religious studies, and semiotics (this is a very Canadian statement), it is essentially a field populated by people from somewhere else, with the odd "native" specialist in theory. Comments? From: Willard McCarty Subject: Latest snapshot of the Oxford Text Archive Date: 26 August 1987, 11:39:15 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 228 (228) Lou Burnard sends this listing of the contents of the Archive. When we figure out how to keep files centrally for distribution on request, information of this kind won't semi-automatically be mailed to everyone. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 229 (229) =========== OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE SHORTLIST - SEPTEMBER 1987 ================== This list contains author and title information only for all texts currently held in the Oxford Text Archive. It also contains information about the their holdings supplied by the following other Archives:- Ca Literary & Linguistic Computing Centre, University of Cambridge Ph Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania Pi Ist. di Linguistica Computazionale, Universita di Pisa Pr Humanities Research Center, Brigham Young University --LEGEND--------------------------------------------------------------- Each entry has a prefix indicating :- The "lead site" code for the text:- This two character code indicates the site from which the text originated or where it is held. Full details of addresses etc. for each site code used are given at the end of the list of texts. The availability of the text at Oxford:- U = generally available on receipt of signed user declaration; A = prior written consent of depositor needed; contact Oxford X = not available outside Oxford = Address all enquiries direct to the Archive concerned The TOMES identifier of the text. This number should be used to identify the text on order forms etc. The size of the text:- A = less than half a Megabyte (will probably fit on one diskette) B = up to a Megabyte C = up to 2 Megabytes D = up to 5 Megabytes E = greater than 5 Megabytes = information not available The following special characters are used for accents etc.:- ^ supershift (so ^a is ae ligature) * acute accent \ cedilla { grave ~ bar over ] umlaut --ORDER PROCEDURE------------------------------------------------------- ** NB This applies to texts ordered from Oxford only*** To order copies of U category texts you must send :- (a) A signed completed order form (b) Payment in advance To order copies of A category texts you must also provide :- (c) Written authorisation from the depositor of the text Order forms are available from Oxford on request, as are Depositor addresses (for A category texts). Electronic mail is the quickest way of reaching us: archive @ uk.ac.ox.vax (JANET) archive%vax.ox.ac.uk @ ukacrl.earn (BITNET) archive%vax.ox.ac.uk @ ucl.cs.edu (EDU) (but we do NOT normally issue texts over networks) Telephone (less reliable):- +44 (865) 273238 [direct] or 273200 [switchboard] Postal address (slow but sure): Oxford Text Archive Oxford University Computing Service 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN Current charges:- * 5 pounds per text plus 15 pounds media and packing (Europe) or 25 pounds (outside Europe) for each tape or diskette needed to complete an order * PAYMENT MUST BE MADE IN ADVANCE AND WE CANNOT ISSUE INVOICES! * Payments not made in sterling attract a surcharge of 10 pounds. * All payments should be made to the account of OXFORD UNIVERSITY COMPUTING SERVICE. ---SHORTLIST------------------------------------------------------------ TOMES Database Snapshot taken on 26 Aug 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 230 (230) Collections, corpora &c Ox U 413 C | Collection of pre-Islamic verse Ox U 415 A | Early Arabic epistles Ox U 420 A | Modern Arabic prose samples Hamadhani Ox U 416 A | Poems From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 231 (231) Bible Ph 1109 A | Selected books, ed Stone From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 232 (232) Collections, corpora &c Ph 1117 A | Nag Hammadi Library Bible Ph 1108 A | Pauline Corpus (ed Horner) Ph 1107 A | Psalms (ed Budge) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 233 (233) Anonymous Ca 905 A | Floris ende Blancefloer Collections, corpora &c Ca 907 B | Die Haager Liederhandschrift Le X 424 E | Eindhoven corpus of contemporary Dutch Ca 906 A | Liederen en Gedichten uit het Gruuthuse-Handschrift Ca 909 A | Van Vrouwen ende van Minne: Middelnederlandse gedichte Hadewijch Ca 831 A | 13th century mystic poems (ed. S.J. van Mierlo) Vondel, Joost van den Ca 910 C | Collected works From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 234 (234) Anonymous Ox U 535 A | Alliterative Morte Arthure Ox U 817 B | Anglo Saxon Chronicle (selections) Ox U 586 D | Anglo Saxon Poetic Records (ed Krapp & Dobbie) Ox U 814 A | Apollonius of Tyre (ed Goolden) Ox U 1 A | Arden of Faversham Ox U 816 A | Blickling homilies 7 8 and 19 (ed Morris) Ox U 36 A | Cursor mundi (Edinburgh ms) Ca 916 D | Domesday Book and its Satellites (parts) Ox U 664 A | Edmund Ironside Ox A 557 A | Englands Helicon Ca U 53 A | Erkenwald Ox U 3 A | Famous victories of Henry V Ca 935 C | Floris and Blauncheflur Ox U 9 A | King Leir and his daughters Ox U 33 A | Lenten sermons from MS BM Harley 2276 Ox U 658 A | Lyfe of Ipomydon (ed Ikegami) Ox U 170 B | Medi^aval devotional prose (mss in the Katherine group) Ca 929 A | Northern Homilies Cycle (Eustace, Oswald and Alexis legends) Ox U 815 A | Orosius' Histories (ed Sweet) Ox A 109 A | Owl and the nightingale Ox A 581 A | Pearl (ed Gordon) Ox A 1047 A | Peirce the Ploughmans Crede (ed Skeat) Ox U 10 A | Pricke of conscience (ed Morris) Ox U 279 A | Rauf Gilyear Ox U 62 A | Sir Gawayne and the grene knyght Ox U 11 A | Sir Thomas More Ox A 22 A | Speculum vit^a (BL Add 33995, ed Robinson) Ox U 813 A | St Augustine's soliloquies (ed Endter) Ox U 4 A | Taming of a shrew Ox U 290 A | The Asloan ms Ox U 403 A | The Bannatyre ms Ox U 414 A | The Maitland folio Ox U 595 A | The Tibetan book of the dead (translations) Ox U 283 A | The chapman and myllar prints Ox U 388 A | The complaynt of Scotland Ox U 7 A | Thomas of Woodstock Ox U 5 B | Troublesome reign of King John Ox A 697 B | Wycliffite sermons (further selections) Ox A 174 B | Wycliffite sermons (17 14th century sermons) Collections, corpora &c Ox U 159 C | American news stories Ox A 545 D | Anthology of 14 Canadian poets (ed Djwa) Ox X 685 E | Articles from the New Scientist (2.12.82-12.5.83) Ox U 401 B | Augustan prose sample Pr 1068 A | BYU corpus of US Constitutional writings Ox A 646 A | Berkshire Probate Inventories (ed C.R.J. Currie) Ox U 643 D | Birkbeck spelling error corpus Ox A 160 C | British Columbian Indian myths Be A 402 D | Brown corpus of present day American English Ox U 161 B | Civil War polemic (34 3000-word samples ) Ox U 163 E | Complete corpus of Old English (the Toronto D.O.E. Corpus) Ox U 164 C | Dedications etc. transcribed by Ralph Crane Ox U 668 D | Kucera-Francis wordlist (frequency countof text 402) Be A 167 E | Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus of modern English (tagged, horizon Ox U 173 B | Lexis (samples of spoken English) Be A 168 D | London-Lund corpus of spoken English Lv A 555 E | Louvain corpus of modern English drama Be A 1046 B | Melbourne-Surrey Corpus of Australian English Ca 920 A | Methodist Letters (18th Century) Ox A 171 E | Michigan Early Modern English materials Ox U 172 D | Modern prose (15 2000-word samples) Ox U 701 B | Older Scottish Texts (The Edinburgh DOST Corpus) Ox U 1024 B | Records of Early English Drama (Selections) Ox U 166 E | Warwick corpus of written materials Dictionaries, &c Ox U 155 E | Collins English dictionary Ox U 571 D | English pronouncing dictionary (Daniel Jones) Ox U 1054 E | MRC Psycholinguistic database (Expanded SOED entries) Ox U 683 A | Oxford advanced learner's dictionary (parsed and tagged version Ox U 710 D | Oxford advanced learner's dictionary (expanded "Computer Usable Ox U 667 D | Oxford advanced learner's dictionary (untagged version) Ox U 154 E | Oxford advanced learner's dictionary (ed A.S. Hornby) Ox U 592 C | Oxford dictionary of music Ox U 398 D | Oxford dictionary of quotations Ox U 288 D | Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English Ox U 157 D | Shorter Oxford dictionary (headwords only) Ox U 400 B | Thorndike-Lorge magazine count Ox X 559 E | Webster's 7th international dictionary (MARC format) Akenside, Mark Ox U 392 A | Pleasures of the imagination Ashford, Daisy Ox A 553 A | The young visiters Austen, Jane Ca A 12 C | Emma Ox U 13 C | Letters (ed R.W. Chapman) Ca A 14 B | Northanger Abbey & Persuasion Ox U 16 B | Pride and prejudice Ox U 18 B | Sense and sensibility Austen, Jane (et al) Ox U 17 B | Sanditon Ayckbourn, Alan Ox U 425 A | Relatively speaking Barbour, John Ox U 218 A | The Brus Barnes, Barnabe Ox U 19 A | Sonnets Barnes, Peter Ox U 426 A | The ruling class Barstow, Stan Ox A 490 B | A kind of loving Baxter, David Ox U 427 A | Will somebody please say something Beaumont, Francis Ox A 611 A | The knight of the burning pestle Beckett, Samuel Ox A 1058 A | Company Ox U 20 A | Ping & Lessness Ox U 23 A | Waiting for Godot Bennett, Alan Ox U 428 A | Getting on Bermange, Barry Ox U 429 A | Oldenberg Berryman, John Ox U 24 A | Dream songs Berton, Pierre Ox X 684 B | Settling the West 1896-1914: The promised land Bible Ph U 1060 E | King James Authorised Version Ph U 1061 E | Revised Standard Version Bowen, John Ox U 430 A | After the rain Brennan, Michael Ox A 6 A | The war in Clare 1911-1921 Brenton, Howard Ox U 431 A | Christie in love Bruce, Michael Ox U 28 A | Collected poems Bullokar, John Ox U 25 A | Three pamphlets on grammar Byrne, John Ox A 543 A | Still life Ox A 541 A | The slab boys Ox A 542 A | Threads Cameron K.C. et al Ox A 662 A | The computer and modern language studies Campbell, Ken Ox U 466 A | Anything you say will be twisted Capgrave, John Ox A 536 A | Solace of pilgrimes Ox A 162 A | The life of St. Norbert Carlyle, Thomas Ox U 26 B | 200 selected prose samples Ox A 549 A | English and other critical essays Carroll, Lewis Ox U 27 B | Alice in Wonderland Cather, Willa Ox U 626 A | The professor's house Chapman, George Ox A 624 A | The revenge of Bussy d'Ambois Chaucer, Geoffrey Ox U 29 C | Canterbury Tales (ed Robinson) Ox X 704 B | Canterbury tales (ed N.F. Blake) Cheatle, Syd Ox U 432 A | Straight up Chesterfield, Earl of Ox U 30 A | The case of the Hanover forces in England Chettle, Henry Ox U 678 A | Kind heart's dream Ox U 675 A | The card of fancy Clough, Arthur Hugh Ox A 1045 A | Collected verse Coggan, Jean Ox A 251 A | Through the day with Jesus Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Ox A 538 B | Notebooks (ed Coburn) vols 1-3 Ox U 31 A | Poetical works (ed E.H. Coleridge) Collins, Wilkie Ox A 1056 B | The woman in white Collins, William Ox U 32 A | Odes & Eclogues Communist Affairs Ox A 492 C | Vol 1 Num 1 Jan 1982 Conrad, Joseph Ox U 627 A | Lord Jim Cooper, Giles Ox U 34 A | Everything in the garden Ox U 433 A | Happy family Cooper, Thomas Ox A 551 A | The life of Thomas Cooper Cowper, William Ox U 35 A | The task Cregan, David Ox U 434 A | The houses by the green Daniel, Samuel Ox U 37 A | Rosamund Darwin, Charles Ca 914 E | Collected Letters of Charles Darwin Ox U 632 A | Sketch of 1842 Davies, Robertson Ox A 661 A | A voice from the attic Davies, Sir John Ox U 556 A | A discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never subdued (e Defoe, Daniel Ox U 537 A | Moll Flanders Ox A 1020 B | Robinson Crusoe Dekker, Thomas Ox U 39 A | Match mee in London Ox A 619 A | The honest whore (part 2) Ox U 38 A | Witch of Edmonton Dell, Jack Holton Ox U 467 A | The duel Devanny, Jean Ox A 534 A | The butcher's shop Dickens, Charles Ox U 40 A | A Christmas carol Pr 1067 B | A tale of two cities Ox A 657 B | Edwin Drood Ox A 1055 B | Great expectations Ca 915 A | Oliver Twist Disraeli, Benjamin Ox A 550 A | Lord George Bentinck: a political biography Donne, John Ox U 1029 A | Anatomie of the world: the first anniversary Ox A 1052 A | Poems (1633) Ox U 43 A | Songs and sonnets (part) Dostoevski, F. (translations) Ox U 44 A | Notes from underground Dryden, John Ox U 42 A | Absalom and Achitophel Dryden, Ken Ox U 596 B | The game Du Bartas, G. de S. (translations) Ox A 651 A | Divine weeks and works (vol. 2) Du Maurier, Daphne Ox A 498 B | Rebecca Dudley, Fourth Lord North Ca 918 A | Collected Poems Dudley, Third Lord North Ca 917 A | Collected Poems Duffy, Maureen Ox U 468 A | Rites Dylan, Bob Ox U 45 A | Published songs 1962-9 Ox A 491 A | Tarantula Edgeworth, Roger Ox A 244 A | Sermons very fruitful godly and learned (1557) Eliot, George Ca A 48 D | Daniel Deronda Ca A 47 D | Middlemarch Ca U 46 A | Silas Marner Eliot, Thomas Stearns Ca A 49 D | Complete poems and plays Ox U 50 A | Poems 1909-35 England, Barry Ox U 435 A | Conduct unbecoming Erasmus (translations) Ox U 51 A | De immensa Dei misericordia (tr Hervet) Fielding, Henry Ox U 54 C | Joseph Andrews Ox U 55 C | Miscellanies Ox U 56 A | Shamela Fitzgerald, F. Scott Ox U 57 B | The great Gatsby Fleming, Ian Ox A 507 A | Dr No Fletcher, John Ox U 802 A | Demetrius and Enanthe Ox U 1021 A | Monsieur Thomas Ox U 688 A | The chances Ox A 605 A | The faire maide of the inne Ox U 689 A | The island princess Ox U 691 A | The loyal subject Ox A 623 A | The tragedy of Bonduca Ox U 690 A | The woman's prize Ox U 1022 A | Tragedy of Valentinian Fletcher, John (et al) Ox U 58 A | Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt Ford, John Ox A 639 A | 'Tis pitty shee's a whore Frisby, Terence Ox U 436 A | There's a girl in my soup Frost, Robert Ox U 59 A | Selected verse Fry, Christopher Ox U 520 A | A phoenix too frequent Ox U 522 A | The lady's not for burning Ox U 521 A | Thor with angels Frye, Northrop Ox A 660 A | The bush garden Ox X 597 B | The educated imagination Galt, John Ox A 177 A | Ringan Gilhaize Gaskell, Elizabeth Ox U 61 A | Selected contributions to Frasers Gill, Peter Ox U 469 A | Over gardens out Gower, John Ca U 63 A | Confessio amantis Graves, Robert Ca 928 B | Claudius the God Ca U 64 B | Complete poems Ca 927 B | I, Claudius Gray, Simon Ox U 437 A | Butley Gray, Thomas Ox U 65 A | Complete poems Greene, Graham Ox A 489 A | Brighton rock Greene, Robert Ox U 681 A | A quip for an upstart courtier Ox U 674 A | Cony-catching (parts 1 & 2) Ox U 676 A | Frier Bacon and Frier Bungay Ox U 66 C | Proverbs Ox U 682 A | Repentance Ox U 665 A | Tarlton's newes out of purgatorie Ox U 677 A | The Scottish history of James the fourth Ox U 672 A | The black book's messenger Ox U 673 A | The black dog of Newgate Ox U 671 A | The comical history of Alphonsus Ox U 679 A | The history of Orlando furioso Griffin, James Ox A 654 A | Well-being: its meaning, measurement and moral importance Guevara, Antonio (translations) Ox U 91 B | The golden book of Marcus Aurelius (tr J. Bourchier, Lord Bern Hampton, Christopher Ox U 438 A | The philanthropist Hansford-Johnson, Pamela Ox A 531 A | Night and silence, who is here Hardy, Thomas Ox U 67 C | Far from the madding crowd Ox A 539 B | Jude the obscure Ox U 68 B | Tess of the D'Urbervilles Hare, David Ox U 470 A | Slag Harries, Richard Ox A 252 A | Turning to prayer Hauser, Arnold Pr 1069 D | Sociology of art Haworth, Don Ox U 471 A | A hearts and minds job Hawthorn, Nathaniel Ox U 69 A | Selections Hay, Gilbert Ox U 220 A | The buke of the law of armys; The buke of knychthode Hearst, Pattie Ox U 70 A | Diaries Henryson, Robert Ox U 243 A | Collected works Hervey, Thomas Ox U 71 A | Letter to Sir Thomas Hanmer Hesse, Hermann (translations) Ox U 393 A | Steppenwolf Heywood, Thomas Ox A 635 A | A woman kilde with kindnesse Hill, Susan Ox A 510 A | Gentleman and ladies Hockey, Susan Ox A 156 A | A guide to computer applications in the humanities Hogg, James Ox A 588 A | The three perils of man Hopkins, Gerard Manley Ox U 73 A | Complete verse Hopkins, John Ox U 472 A | Find your way home Housman, A.E. Ox U 1034 A | A Shropshire lad Howarth, Donald Ox U 473 A | Three months gone Johnson, Samuel Ox A 76 B | Journey to the Western Isles Ox U 75 A | London & The vanity of human wishes Ox U 77 A | Rasselas Prince of Abissinia Jonson, Ben Ox U 78 A | Pleasure reconcil'd to vertue (a masque) Ox A 616 A | Volpone Joyce, James Ox U 79 A | Dubliners Ox U 1030 A | Extract from 'Work in Progress' Ox U 80 A | Portrait of the artist Julian of Norwich Ox U 700 B | A revelation of divine love Kant, Immanuel (translations) Ox A 289 B | Critique of pure reason Keats, John Ox U 81 C | Poetical works (ed J. Stillinger) Khapa, Tsong (translations) Ox X 652 A | The essence of true eloquence (translations) King, Martin Luther Ox A 532 A | Stride for freedom Kydd, Thomas Ox U 83 A | Cornelia Ox U 82 A | Spanish tragedie Laffan, Kevin Ox U 439 A | It's a two-foot-six-inches-above-the-ground world Langland, William Ox A 500 A | The vision of Piers Plowman (ed Schmidt) Larson, Clinton F. Pr 1070 C | Collected works Lawrence, David Herbert Ox U 84 A | St Mawr Layamon Ox U 85 B | Brut (two mss) Le Carre*, John Ox A 86 A | The spy who came in from the cold Lessing, Doris Ox U 87 A | Each his own wilderness Ox U 89 A | Memoirs of a survivor Ox U 88 A | Summer before the dark Lowell, Robert Ox U 90 A | Notebook Luke, Peter Ox U 474 A | Hadrian VII Malamud, Bernard Ox A 52 A | The assistant Mansfield, Katherine Ca U 92 A | Selected short stories Manwaring Ox U 93 A | Seaman's glossary Marcus, Franc Ox U 441 A | Mrs Mouse are you within? Marlowe, Christopher Ox U 94 B | Dramatic works Ox A 615 A | Tamburlaine (part 2) Marston, John Ox A 629 A | The Dutch courtezan Marvell, Andrew Ox U 95 A | Miscellaneous poems Massinger, Philip Ox A 603 A | A new way to pay old debts Maugham, Robert Ox U 475 A | Enemy Maugham, Robin Ox U 442 A | The servant McGrath, John Ox U 440 A | Events while guarding the Bofors gun Medwall, Henry Ox U 1032 A | Nature Melville, Herman Ox U 96 C | Moby Dick Ox U 628 A | Moby Dick (Signet ed) Mercer, David Ox U 476 A | Belcher's luck Middleton, Thomas Ox U 97 B | A game at chess (two mss) Ox U 584 A | Newes from Persia and Poland touching Sir Robert Sherley... Ox U 15 A | Song in several parts Ox U 583 A | The black book Ox U 585 A | The ghost of Lucrece Ox A 642 A | The revenger's trag^adie Ox U 98 A | The witch Millar, Ronald Ox U 443 A | Abelard and Heloise Milner, Roger Ox U 444 A | How's the world treating you? Milton, John Ox A 1027 A | English poems Ox U 102 A | Il penseroso Ox U 100 B | Paradise lost Ox U 101 A | Samson agonistes Monaco, James Ox U 705 C | The Connoisseur's Guide to the Movies (1985) Mortimer, John Ox U 477 A | A voyage around my father Moss, Rose Ox A 103 B | The terrorist Munday, Anthony Ox A 630 A | The book of John a} Kent & John a} Cumber Murdoch, Iris Ox A 509 B | The bell Nashe, Thomas Ox U 680 A | Pierce pennyless Ox U 105 A | Summer's last will and testament Nassyngton, William of Ox U 653 A | The bande of louynge Nichols, Peter Ox U 445 A | A day in the death of Joe Egg Norman, Frank Ox U 478 A | Inside out O'Casey, Sean Ox U 107 A | Juno and the paycock Ox U 108 A | Shadow of a gunman Ox U 106 A | The plough and the stars O'Malley, Ernie Ox A 213 A | Army without banners Ox A 574 B | The singing flame O'Neill, Michael Ox U 446 A | The bosom of the family Orton, Joe Ox U 447 A | What the butler saw Orwell, George Ox A 1097 A | 1984 Osborne, John Ox U 448 A | West of Suez Parfit, Derek Ox X 250 B | Reasons and persons Paston family Ox A 395 C | Letters and papers of the 15th century (ed N. Davies), vol 1 on Patten, Brian Ox U 1042 A | Selected verse Peel, Sir Robert Ox A 552 A | Memoirs, part 1 Pinner, David Ox U 449 A | Dickon Pinter, Harold Ox U 450 A | Old times Plath, Sylvia Ox U 111 A | Collected poems Ox U 110 A | The bell jar Pope, Alexander Ox A 580 A | Rape of the lock Pound, Ezra Ox U 113 B | Cantos Ox U 112 A | Guide to Kulchur Powell, Antony Ox A 508 A | Acceptance world Pulman, Jack Ox U 479 A | The happy apple Ramsley, Peter Ox U 480 A | Disabled Randolph, Thomas Ox U 114 A | Aristippus Ox U 116 A | Pr^aludium Ox U 115 A | The conceited pedler Ox U 117 A | The drinking academy Ox U 118 A | The fary knight Rattigan, Terence Ox U 451 A | A bequest to the nation Ross, Kenneth Ox U 452 A | Mr Kilt and the great I am Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Ox A 217 B | Works, ed W.M. Rossetti Rowley, William Ox A 608 A | All's lost by lust Saunders, James Ox U 481 A | Neighbours Schumacher, E.F. Ox A 399 A | Small is beautiful Scott, Walter Ox U 74 A | Castle Dangerous Ox U 165 A | Selected poems Ox U 60 A | The antiquary Scruton, Roger Ox A 533 C | Fortnight's anger Selbourne, David Ox U 453 A | The damned Shaffer, Anthony Ox U 454 A | Sleuth Shaffer, Peter Ox U 455 A | Black comedy Shakespeare, William Ox U 133 A | 1 Henry IV (Q1) Ox U 134 A | 2 Henry IV (Q1) Ox U 125 A | A midsummer nights dream (Q1) Ox A 119 D | Complete works (first folio) Ox U 2 A | Contention of York & Lancaster [Henry VI part 2] (Q1) Ox U 135 A | Edward III (Q1) Ox U 1064 A | Hamlet (Q1) Ox U 121 A | Hamlet (Q2) Ox U 169 A | Julius Caesar (Arden ed) Ox U 123 A | King Lear (Q1) Ox U 122 A | Loves labours lost (Q1) Ox U 126 A | Merchant of Venice (Q1) Ox U 1057 A | Merry wives of Windsor (Q1) Ox U 120 A | Much ado about nothing (Q1) Ox U 124 A | Othello (Q1) Ox U 127 A | Pericles (Q1) Ox A 138 A | Poems Ox U 129 A | Richard II (Q1) Ox U 130 A | Richard III (Q1) Ox U 128 A | Romeo and Juliet (Q2) Ox U 137 A | Sonnets Ox A 659 C | The tempest (various editions) Ox U 131 A | Titus Andronicus (Q1) Ox U 132 A | Troilus and Cressida (Q1) Ox U 8 A | True tragedie of Richard Duke of York [Henry VI part 3] (Q1) Ox U 136 A | Two noble kinsmen (Q1) Shakespeare, William (et al) Ox A 529 A | The passionate pilgrim Shaw, Robert Ox U 456 A | Cato street Shelley, Percy Bysshe Ox U 139 A | Prometheus unbound Shirley, Thomas Ox A 601 A | The cardinal Simpson, N.F. Ox U 457 A | The cresta run Speight, Johny Ox U 458 A | If there weren't any blacks, you'd have to invent them Spencer, Colin Ox U 482 A | Spitting image Spender, Stephen Ox A 141 A | Collected poems Ox A 142 A | The generous days Spenser, Edmund Ca A 144 D | Faerie Queene Ca U 143 A | Minor poems Spurling, John Ox U 483 A | Macrune's Guevara Sterne, Laurence Ox A 1048 C | Tristram Shandy Stoppard, Tom Ox U 459 A | Jumpers Storey, David Ox U 484 A | Home Ox A 72 A | This sporting life Taylor, A.J.P. Ox A 158 C | English History 1914-1945 Taylor, Cecil Ox U 460 A | Bread and butter Terson, Peter Ox U 485 A | Spring-heeled Jack Thomson, James Ox A 21 A | The seasons Tolkien, J.R.R. Pr 1071 B | The hobbit Pr 1072 B | The lord of the rings Tourneur, Cyril Ox A 600 A | The atheist's tragedy Ox U 145 A | The revenger's tragedy Ustinov, Peter Ox U 461 A | The unknown soldier and his wife Wager, William Ox U 1033 A | Enough is as good as a feast Ox U 1031 A | The longer thou livest the more fool thou art Wain, John Ox A 530 A | Hurry on down Waugh, Evelyn Ox A 146 B | Brideshead revisited Webster, John Ox A 612 A | A speedie poste, with certaine new letters Ox A 610 A | Miscellania Ox A 607 A | The devil's law-case Ox A 606 A | The merchant's handmaide ... Ox A 631 A | The tragedy of the dutchesse of Malfy Ox A 613 A | The valiant Scot Ox A 618 A | The white divel Webster, John (et al) Ox A 602 A | A cure for a cuckold Ox A 621 A | Anything for a quiet life Ox A 599 A | Appius and Virginia Ox A 637 A | North-ward hoe Ox A 620 A | The famous history of Sir Thomas Wyat Ox A 634 A | The induction to the malcontent ... Ox A 617 A | West-ward hoe Welburn, Vivienne Ox U 462 A | Johnny so long Wesker, Arnold Ox U 463 A | The friends Whitehead, E.A. Ox U 464 A | The foursome Wilkins, George Ox U 666 A | Pericles Prince of Tyre (ed Bullough) Ox U 663 A | The miseries of an enforced marriage Wilson, R.A. Ox A 594 A | The birth of language Woolf, Virginia Ca U 147 A | A haunted house, and other stories Ox U 149 A | Mrs Dalloway Ox U 148 A | The waves Ox U 150 A | To the lighthouse Wordsworth, William Ox U 151 A | Lyrical ballads Wyatt, Thomas Ca U 152 A | Poetical works Wycherley Ox A 1049 A | The country wife Wymark, Olwen Ox U 465 A | Stay where you are Yeats, William Butler Ox U 153 C | Complete poems Ox U 1023 A | Essays and introductions Zimmerman, Carle C. Ox X 591 A | Siam: Rural Economic Survey, 1930-31 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 235 (235) Anonymous Pr 1074 C | Kalevala (ed E. Lnnrot) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 236 (236) Anonymous Ox U 175 A | Aliscans Ca A 893 B | La chanson de Roland (ed Whitehead, 1947) Ox A 587 A | Le roman de Tristan (tome 3) Ox A 187 A | Li fet des Romains I Ox A 404 A | Li quatre livre des Reis Collections, corpora &c Ox U 199 C | 18th century correspondence Ox A 191 B | Echantillon du que*becois parle* Pr 1066 B | English-French translation database Ox U 569 A | Modern business correspondence Ox U 176 A | Old French corpus Ox A 590 A | Sample of Nova Scotian Acadian French Balzac, Honore* de Ox A 572 B | La peau de chagrin Bayle, Pierre Ca 938 A | Avis aux Re*fugie*s Ca 939 A | Correspondence Beckett, Samuel (translations) Ox A 604 A | En attendant Godot Bernanos Ox U 178 A | M. Ouine Bible Ox A 570 A | The gospels (part) Calvin, Jean Ca 940 A | Supplementa Calviniana, Vol. II (6 sermons) Ce*line, P. Ox U 179 A | Voyage au bout de la nuit Chartier, Alain Ca 941 B | Poetical works Chawaf, Chantal Ox A 1044 A | La valle*e incarnate Ox A 1050 A | Landes Ox A 1051 A | Maternite* Chre*tien de Troyes Ox A 180 A | Cliges Ox A 181 A | Erec Ox A 182 A | Lancelot Ox A 183 A | Perceval Ox A 184 A | Ywain Constant, Benjamin Ca U 560 A | Adolphe Ca A 185 B | Lettres Cre*billon, C.P.J. (fils) Ox A 614 A | La nuit et le moment Ox A 622 A | Le hasard du coin de feu Ox U 1104 A | Le sopha Ox A 609 A | Les e*garements du coeur et de l'esprit Froissart, Jean Ox A 698 B | Chronicles (Ms Reg. Lat. 869) Ca 900 A | Chronicles (selections) Gide, Andre* Ox U 186 A | L'Immoraliste Guillaume de Lorris Ca 898 B | Le Roman de la Rose Guyotat, Pierre Ox A 573 A | E*den E*den E*den Jean de Howden Ca 899 A | Li rossignos Mallarme*, S. Ca 897 D | Poetical works Malraux, Andre* Ox U 189 A | La tentation de l'occident Ox U 190 A | La voie royale Ox U 188 A | Les Conque*rants Marguerite de Navarre Ox U 499 C | L'Heptameron Maupassant, Guy de Ox A 215 A | Pierre et Jean Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de Ox U 1059 C | Les essais (ed. Villey) Nerval, Ge*rard de Ca 896 A | Aure*lia Orle*ans, Charles d' Pr 1075 C | Poe*sies completes Pre*vost, Abbe* Ox A 41 A | Manon Lescaut Proust, Marcel Na X 405 E | A la recherche du temps perdu Queneau, Raymond Na X 192 A | Exercises de style Na X 193 A | Pierrot mon ami Rabelais, Francois Ca 895 E | Complete works Rene* d'Anjou Ca 894 A | Livre du cuer d'amours espris Rimbaud, Arthur Ox U 811 A | Collected verse Robbe-Grillet, Alain Ox U 194 A | La jalousie Sartre, Jean-Paul Ox U 195 A | La nause*e Schwob, Maurice Pr 1076 B | Writings on the Dreyfus Affair Stendhal Na X 196 B | La chartreuse de Parme Na X 197 B | Le rouge et le noir Na X 198 B | Lucien Leuwen Vaugelas, Claude Favre de Ox U 253 B | Remarques sur la langue franc\oise From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 237 (237) Ba, A.H. Ox U 494 A | Kaidara Lacroix, P.F. Ox U 493 A | Poe*sie peule de l'Adamawa Sow, A.I. Ox U 496 A | Contes et fables des veille*es Ox U 495 A | La femme, la vache, la foi From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 238 (238) Anonymous Ox A 625 A | Seanmenta chinge uladh A'Kempis, Thomas (translations) Ox A 1036 B | Imitatio Christi Conrad, Joseph (tr Mac Grianna) Ox U 1174 A | Amy Foster Ox U 1173 A | Seidea*n Bruithne (Typhoon) Mac Grianna, Seosamh Ox A 214 A | Pa*draic O* Conaire agus aist^m* eile Ox U 1172 A | Pa*draic O* Conaire agus aist^m* eile (1936 ed) O* Grianna, Se*amus Ox U 1176 A | An Teach na*r To*gadh Ox A 1178 A | Caislea*in O*ir Ox U 1175 A | Michea*l Ruadh Ox A 1177 A | Sce*al U*r agus Sean-Sce*al From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 239 (239) Anonymous Ca 892 B | Aviso (newspaper, 1609) Ox U 202 B | Das Nibelungenlied Ca 880 A | Das St Trudperter Hohe Lied Ca 879 B | Daz Anegenge Ca 890 B | Die Vorauer Bu]cher Moses Ca 876 B | Die altdeutsche Exodus Ca 887 A | Graf Rudolf Ca 883 B | Kudrun Ca 875 C | Relation oder Zeitung (newspaper, 1609) Ca 884 B | Strassburger Alexander Ox U 210 A | Tundalus der Ritter Collections, corpora &c Ca 882 C | Die religio]sen Dichtungen des 11 und 12 Jh.s Ca 885 B | Early German sermons Ca 908 A | Lieder der Berliner Hs Germ fol 992 Mn X 207 D | Mannheimer Korpus Pr 1078 B | Pfeffer corpus of spoken German Ca 874 C | Sermons of the 12, 13 and 14 centuries Ca 881 B | Speculum ecclesi^a: Early Middle High German sermons Dictionaries, &c Ox A 246 C | Lexikon zur Wortbildung Morpheminventar A-Z Ox U 818 D | Pons German-French dictionary (part) Beckett, Samuel (translations) Ox A 598 A | Warten auf Godot Benn, Gottfried Ox U 200 C | Works (ed Lyon) Bo]hme, Jacob Ca 891 B | Aurora Brecht, Berthold Pr 1079 D | Poetic works Celan, Paul Pr 1080 C | Gessamelte werke Ox U 201 A | Selected poems Eckartbote Ox A 567 C | Selections Eilhart von Oberge Ca 889 B | Tristrant Fleck, Konrad Ca 888 B | Flore und Blanscheflur Goethe, Wolfgang von Pr 1081 C | Complete works (Hamburg ed) Ox U 203 B | Faust Grimm, W. and J. Ox U 204 A | Ma]rchen (selected) Hartmann von Aue Ox U 211 A | Der arme Heinrich Hermann von Sachsenheim Ca 886 A | Der Spiegel Ca 877 B | Eraclius Hofmannsthals, Hugo von Pr 1082 C | Poetic works Kafka, Franz Pr 1084 B | Der process (historical critical ed) Ox U 205 A | In der Strafkolonie Kempowski, Walter Pr 1083 E | Deutschen chronik Mann, Thomas Ox U 206 A | Tonio Kro]ger Meyer, Conrad Pr 1085 C | Poetic works Meyer, Conrad F. Ox U 812 A | Die Hochzeit des Mo]nchs Ox U 208 A | Lyric poems Notker III of St Gall Ca 878 C | Psalmen, nach der Wiener Handschrift Stramm, August Ox U 209 A | Complete poems Wittgenstein, Ludwig Ox X 562 A | Culture and value Ox X 564 A | Last writings on the philosophy of psychology (part) Ox X 563 B | Remarks on the philosophy of psychology From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 240 (240) Anonymous Ls U 265 A | Homeric hymns Ir X 316 A | Homeric hymns (TLG ed) Collections, corpora &c Ph 1115 A | Early Christian Materials : versions of 3 Corinthians. Ir X 421 A | Greek anthology Ph 1113 A | Inscriptions (Cornell) Ph 1114 A | Inscriptions (Princeton) Ox A 270 D | Oxyrhynchus papyri vols 11-46 (documentary papyri only) Ox A 696 E | The Duke documentary papyri corpus Dictionaries, &c Ph 1112 D | Dictionary for Greek New Testament Achilles Tatius Ir X 386 A | Collected works Aeschylus Ir X 418 B | Collected works Ls U 212 B | Five plays Apollonius Rhodius Ls U 221 A | Argonautica, 3 Ir X 486 A | Collected works Apostolic Fathers Ls U 222 A | Works (ed Lake) Aratus Ir X 487 A | Collected works Ls U 223 A | Ph^anomena Archytas Ox U 224 A | Doubling the cube Aristarchus of Samos Ox U 225 A | On sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon Aristophanes Ox U 227 A | Acharnians Ox U 232 A | Birds Ox U 229 A | Clouds Ir X 488 A | Collected works Ox U 236 A | Ecclesiazous^a Ox U 235 A | Frogs Ox U 228 A | Knights Ox U 233 A | Lysistrata Ox U 231 A | Peace Ox U 237 A | Plutus Ox U 234 A | Thesmophoriazous^a Ox U 230 A | Wasps Aristotle Ir X 226 D | Complete works Aristoxenus of Tarentum Ox U 238 A | Elementa Harmonica Asterius Amasenus Ox A 648 A | Selected homilies (ed Datema) Asterius Sophista Ox A 647 A | Commentarii in Psalmos (ed Richard) Autolycus of Putane Ox U 219 A | De Sph^ara & De Ortibus Bible Ph A 708 D | Greek Jewish Scriptures (ed Rahlfs) Ph U 245 B | Morphologically analysed Pentateuch (Septuagint version) Ph U 1101 E | Morphologically tagged Greek Jewish Scriptures (CATSS text) Ir X 397 D | New Testament Ir X 516 B | Septuagint (TLG text) Ox A 540 C | Septuagint, vols 3 and 13 Ph 1106 E | Tagged Greek New Testament (ed Freibergs) Ox U 269 A | The gospels Callimachus Ir X 513 A | Collected works Chariton Ir X 291 A | Collected works Demosthenes Ir X 292 A | Collected works Diodorus Siculus Ir X 239 D | Collected works Diodorus Tarsensis Ox A 644 A | Commentarii in Psalmos (selected) Diogenes Laertius Ir X 293 A | Collected works Euclid Ls U 240 D | Elements vols 1-4 Euclid (pseudo) Ox U 241 A | Musici scriptores gr^aci Euripides Ir X 294 A | Collected works Ox U 242 B | Major works Eusebius C^asariensis Ox A 649 A | Commentarii in Psalmos (selections) Galen Ir X 547 E | Complete works Gregory of Nyssa Ox U 255 A | De tridui spatio Gregory the Pagurite Ox A 1040 A | Encomium of S. Pamcratius of Taormina Heliodorus Ir X 295 A | Collected works Herodas Ir X 296 A | Collected works Herodotus Ir X 256 E | Complete works Hesiod Ir X 297 A | Collected works Ls U 260 A | Fragments Ls U 257 A | Opera et dies Ls U 258 A | Scutum Ls U 259 A | Theogonia Hippocrates Ox A 261 D | Complete works Hippocrates of Chios Ox U 262 A | Quadrature of the Lunule Homer Ir X 299 A | Collected works Ls U 263 B | Iliad Ls U 264 B | Odyssey Isaeus Ir X 524 A | Collected works Ls U 266 A | Orations Libanius Ir X 389 A | Collected works Longus Ir X 390 A | Collected works Lycophron Ir X 394 A | Collected works Lysias Ox U 267 A | Speeches 12 and 24 Meliton Ox U 268 A | Selections Nicander Ir X 396 A | Collected works Origen Ph 1116 A | Patristics Parthenius Ir X 412 A | Collected works Pausanius Ir X 417 A | Collected works Plato Ir X 419 B | Collected works Ox A 271 D | Works Plato (pseudo) Ox U 561 A | Doubling the cube Plutarch Ir X 515 A | Collected works I Ir X 544 E | Collected works II Ox U 273 A | Moralia Pseudo-Chrysostomus Ox A 640 A | In adorationem venerand^a crucis Ox A 638 A | In resurrectionem Domini (ed Aubineau) Ox A 641 A | Two Easter homilies (ed Liebaert) Pseudo-Evagrius Ox A 1039 A | Life of S. Pancratius of Taormina Pseudo-Galen Ir X 548 A | Works Sextus Empiricus Ox U 248 A | Works (Loeb ed, I and III only) Sophocles Ox U 276 A | Antigone Ir X 517 B | Collected works Ls U 274 A | Electra Ox U 278 A | Oedipus Colonus (part) Ox U 275 A | Oedipus Tyrannus Ox U 277 A | Philoctete St John Damascene Ca 851 A | Selected works Themistocles (pseudo) Ls U 280 A | Epistul^a Theocritus Ir X 518 B | Collected works Thucydides Ir X 281 E | Complete works Xenophon Ir X 519 B | Collected works Ls U 282 C | Major works Xenophon Ephesius Ir X 523 A | Collected works From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 241 (241) Agnon, S.Y. Ox U 216 A | Ha-malbush Ox U 300 B | Hadom vekisee Bible Je U 1119 E | Aligned Texts of Hebrew and Greek Jewish Scriptures (CATSS data Ph A 1111 E | Aligned Texts of Hebrew and Greek Jewish Scriptures (CATSS data Ph U 525 C | Bibl. Heb. Stuttgartensia (Michigan-Claremont text) Ox U 422 A | Book of Job (Targum) Ox U 301 B | Pentateuch Ox A 140 A | Psalms (Targum text) Ph 1110 A | Pseudo-Jonathan (Targum) Dickens, Charles Ca 873 A | Oliver Twist (part) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 242 (242) Anonymous Co A 298 D | Mo]druvallabo*k From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 243 (243) Alighieri, Dante Pi A 695 A | Il paradiso Pi A 694 A | Il purgatorio Pi A 693 A | L'Inferno Ariosto, Lodovico Pi A 1041 B | Orlando furioso Boccaccio, Giovanni Pi A 1120 C | Decameron Pi A 1099 A | Il Teseide Boiardo, Matteo Ox U 1100 B | Orlando Innamorato Calvino, Italo Ox U 406 A | Seven dialect tales Castiglione, B. Ox A 302 A | Il Cortegiano Della Casa, Giovanni Ox U 407 A | Galateo Machiavelli, Niccolo Ox A 303 A | Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua Michelangelo Ox A 304 B | Rime 1-85 Nievo Ox U 408 A | Canzoni popolari greche Pigna, G.B. Ox A 1062 A | Amori Rossetti, Gabriele Ox A 702 C | Letters to Charles Lyell Svevo, Italo Ox A 1043 B | La coscienza di Zeno Tasso, Torquato Ca A 872 B | Gerusalemme Conquistata Ca A 871 B | Gerusalemme Liberata Verga, Giuseppe Ox U 305 A | Six short stories From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 244 (244) Hark^m~, Mulla Sa'^m~d Ox U 249 A | Sgand^m~na~n^m~ texts (ed MacKenzie) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 245 (245) Anonymous Pr 1086 B | Corpus Christianorum Pi 1132 ? | De dubiis nominibus (ed Glorie, 1968) Ox U 309 A | De rebus bellicis Ox U 633 A | Gedichte des Archipoeta (ed Krefeld & Watenpuhl) Pi 1129 ? | Itinerarium Antonini Placentini Ls U 310 A | Sententi^a et epistul^a Hadriani Ox A 497 A | Speculum duorum Ox A 104 A | The book of Ilan Dav Ca 849 A | Vit^a I & II S. Brigit^a Ox U 568 A | Vit^a abbatum Ox U 575 A | Vita S. Cuthberti Collections, corpora &c Pi 1121 ? | Anthologia Latina sive Poesis Latin^a supplementum Pi 1122 ? | Carmina Latina epigraphica (ed Bucheler) Pi 1123 ? | Concilium Constantinopolitanum I Pi 1124 ? | Concilium Nic^anum I Pi 1151 ? | Corpus juris civilis Iustinian^aum Pi 1125 ? | De dubiis nominibus (ed Glorie, 1968) Ox U 409 A | Defixiones Latin^a Ox U 410 A | Dipinti on amphor^a from Rome and Pompeii from CIL 4 and 15 Ox A 512 B | Early scholastic colloquies Pi 1128 ? | Fabularum atellanarum fragm. (ed Frassinetti, 1955) Pi 1154 ? | Grammatici Latini (ed Keil) Ca 848 A | Hiberno-Latin Pi 1126 ? | Incerti auctoris querolus sive aul. (ed Corsaro, 1964) Ox U 411 A | Index of personal names from CIL 13 Ox A 506 A | Littere Wallie Pi 1130 ? | Mimorum Romanorum fragmenta (ed Bonaria, 1955) Ca 861 C | Poet^a Latini ^avi Carolini Pi 1131 ? | Sc^anic^a Romanorum poesis fragmenta (ed Ribbeck, 1897) Dictionaries, &c Ox U 329 C | Codex Theodosiani Ox A 332 A | Historia Augusta Pi 1127 ? | Index Thomisticus (rationarium) Pi 1145 ? | Lexicon totius Latinitatis (Forcellini) Pi 1146 ? | Onomasticon totius Latinitatis (Forcellini) Africanus Ox U 306 A | Fragments Al Kindi Ca 865 B | Iudicia Alan of Lille Ca 867 B | Anticlaudianus Ca 868 B | De planctu Natur^a Alcuin Ca 866 B | Collected verse Ambrose Ls U 307 A | Selections Ammianus Marcellinus Ox U 308 C | Histories Andreas Cappelanus Ox A 321 A | De amore Anselm of Canterbury Ca 864 E | Complete works Apicius Ox U 311 A | De re coquinaria Architrenius Ox U 314 A | Works Arusianus Messius Pi 1133 ? | Exempla elocutionis (ed A Della Casa, 1977) Augustine Ls U 315 A | Selections Aurelius Victor Ox U 317 A | De C^asaribus Bacon, Francis Ox U 318 A | 10 2000-word prose samples Pi 1134 ? | Novum organum Bede Pi 1135 ? | De arte metrica et de schematibus (ed Kendall, 1975) Ox U 578 A | De orthographia Pi 1136 ? | De orthographia (ed Jones, 1975) Ox U 558 A | Epistola ad Egbertum Ox U 577 A | Retractatio Ox U 576 A | Vit^a abbatum Ox U 579 A | Vita S. Cuthberti Bernardus Silvestris Ca 863 B | Cosmographia Bible Ox X 319 E | Vulgate Birch (ed) Ox A 511 C | Cartularium Saxonicum vols 1-3 Boethius Ls U 320 A | De syllogismo hypothetico 1 Cassiodorus Pi 1137 ? | Institutiones (excerpta) (ed Mynors, 1937) Cato Ls U 322 A | De agri cultura Ls U 323 A | Historical and oratorical fragments Catullus Ls U 324 A | Carmina Celsus, P. Iuventius Ls U 325 A | Fragments Charisius Pi 1138 ? | Ars (ed Barwick, 1925) Cicero Ls U 327 D | Major works Cicero (attrib) Ox U 328 A | Epistula ad Octavianum Cosentius Pi 1139 ? | De barbarismis et metaplasmis (ed Niedermann, 1937) Crispin, Gilbert Ca 850 A | Works, ed G. R. Evans Culman, Leonard Ca 862 A | Sententi^a Pueriles Dositheus Pi 1140 ? | Ars (ed Tolkiehn, 1913) Dracontius Blossius Aem. Pi 1141 ? | Orestis tragoedia Einhard Ca 860 A | Vita Karoli Magni Emanuel, Hywel D. (ed) Ox A 504 A | Latin texts of the Welsh law Ennius Quintus Pi 1142 ? | Ennian^a poesis reliqui^a (ed Vahlen, 1928) Eutropius Ox U 330 A | Breviarum A.U.C. Festus Ox U 331 A | Breviarum Festus Sextus Pompeus Pi 1143 ? | De verborum significatione qu^a sup. (ed Lindsay, 1913) Pi 1144 ? | De verborum significatu qu^a sup.cum Pauli epitome Fortunatianus Ox U 326 A | Ars rhetorica (selections) Frithegod Ca 858 A | Breviloquium regum Britanni^a Galilei, Galileo Pi 1147 ? | De motu accelerato Pi 1148 ? | De motu locali Pi 1149 ? | Sidereus nuncius Pi 1150 ? | Theoremata circa centrum gravitatis solidorum Geoffrey of Monmouth Ca 857 C | Historia Regum Britanni^a Giraldus Cambrensis Ox A 503 A | De invectionibus vol 6 Gratian Ox A 699 D | Decretum Gregory of Nyssa (trans) Ox U 582 A | De hominis opificio, tr John Scottus Eriugena Higden, Ranulph Ca 856 A | Mss. Harl 1.48.1, St John 2.29.1 Hippocrates Pi 1152 ? | De ^aribus locis et de aquis Horace Ls U 333 A | Ars Poetica Ls U 334 B | Epistul^a 1-2 Ox U 546 A | Odes Ls U 335 A | Sermones Iulianus Toletanus Pi 1153 ? | Ars (ed Maestre, 1975) John of Hauville Ca 855 B | Architrenius Julianus Ls U 336 A | Fragments Juvenal Ls U 337 A | Satur^a Littleton, Adam Ca 854 A | Lingua Latina liber: dictionarius quadripartitus Livius Andronicus Pi 1155 ? | Fragments (ed Lenchantin, 1937) Livy Ls U 338 E | Ab urbe condita Lucan Ls U 339 B | Bellum civile 1 and 10 Lucretius Ls U 340 A | De rerum Natura Marcellus Empiricus Pi 1156 ? | De medicamentis liber (ed Niedermann, 1968) Marius Victorinus Pi 1170 ? | Ars (ed Mariotti, 1967) Ls U 341 A | Selections Martial Ox U 342 B | Works Modoinus Ox U 343 A | Selected poems More, Thomas Ox U 344 A | Utopia 1 and 2 Nevius Gnaeus Pi 1157 ? | Fragments (ed Marmorale, 1953) Nonius, Marcellus Pi 1158 ? | De compendiosa doctrina XX (ed Lindsay, 1903) Orderic Vitalis Ca 853 D | Ecclesiastical history Ovid Ls U 345 A | Amores Ls U 346 A | Ars amatoria Ls U 347 A | Fasti Ls U 348 A | Medicamina faciei femine Ls U 349 A | Metamorphoses 1 and 12 Ls U 350 A | Nux Ls U 351 A | Remedia amoris Pacuvius, Marcus Pi 1159 ? | Fragments (ed D'Anna, 1971) Paulinus of Nola Pr 1087 A | Carmina sex Pelagius Ox A 505 A | Expositions of thirteen epistles of St Paul Persius Ls U 800 A | Satires Petrarch Ox U 352 A | Bucolicum carmen Petronius Ox U 711 A | Satur^a (ed Buecheler) Pi 1160 ? | Satyricon Phocas Pi 1161 ? | De nomine et verbo (ed Casaceli, 1974) Plautus Ls U 353 A | Amphitruo Ls U 354 A | Asinaria Ls U 355 A | Aulularia Ls U 356 A | Bacchides Ls U 357 A | Captivi Ls U 358 A | Pseudolus Ls U 359 A | Rudens Ls U 360 A | Stichus Ls U 361 A | Trinummus Ls U 362 A | Truculentus Plautus, Titus Maccius Pi 1162 ? | Comoedi^a (ed Lindsay, 1955) Pliny the younger Ls U 363 A | Epistula 10 Poliziano, Angelo Ca 852 C | Latin Letters Pope Gregory Ox A 364 B | Dialogues Rhigyfarch Ox A 501 A | Life of St David Rosmini, Antonio Pi 1163 ? | Constitutione societatis Sallust Ls U 365 B | Complete works Scribonius Largus Pi 1164 ? | Compositionum liber (ed Helmreich, 1887) Seneca ,Lucius Annaeus Pi 1165 ? | Works Simmacus, Quintus Aurelius Pi 1166 ? | Works (ed Seeck, 1883) Spinoza, Baruch Pi 1167 ? | Tractatus de intellectus emendatione Statius Ls U 366 A | Achilleid Ls U 367 A | Silv^a (hexameter poems) Ls U 368 B | Thebaid Symmachus Ox U 369 A | Relationes Tacitus Ox U 370 D | Annals Terentius Afer Pi 1168 ? | Comoedi^a (ed Kauer-Lindsay, 1953) Turpilius Pi 1169 ? | Works (ed Richlewska, 1971) Vegetius Ox U 371 A | Epitoma rei militaris Venantius Fortunatus Ca 859 C | Opera poetica Vergil Ls U 374 A | Aeneid Ls U 372 B | Eclogues Ls U 373 A | Georgics Vergil (attrib) Ls U 312 A | Culex Ls U 313 A | Moretum Victorinus Pi 1171 ? | De solecismo et barbarismo (ed Niedermann, 1937) Wade-Evans, A.W. (ed) Ox A 502 A | Vit^a sanctorum Britanni^a et genealogi^a From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 246 (246) Collections, corpora &c Ox U 287 B | Latvian folksong corpus From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 247 (247) Wilkinson & Winstedt (eds) Ox U 376 C | Pantun melayu From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 248 (248) Bible Pr 1094 B | New testament From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 249 (249) Anonymous Ox U 247 A | Maha~niddesa (ed Poussin & Thomas, I and II only) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 250 (250) Anonymous Ox U 526 A | O auto de Dom Luis et dos Turcos Collections, corpora &c Pr 1088 C | Weidner corpus Rosa, Joao Guimares Pr 1089 C | Grande Sertao: Veredas From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 251 (251) Collections, corpora &c Ox A 377 A | Provencal charters Dictionaries, &c Ox A 380 A | Le breviari d'amor Girart de Roussillon Ox A 378 A | Collected works Giraut de Bornelh Ca 843 A | Texts and variants Guillaume de Machaut Ca 842 A | La Prise d'Alixandre Jofre de Foixa* Ox A 379 A | Regles de trobar From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 252 (252) Leskov, N. Ox U 375 B | Samples of narrative and dialogue Pososhkov, I.T. Ca 841 A | Kniga o Skudosti i Bogatstvye From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 253 (253) Anonymous Ox U 381 A | Bhagavad Gita Ca 836 A | Bodhicarya~vata~ra Ox A 1063 A | The Bilvamangalastava Ox U 589 D | The Rig-Veda Kalida~sa~ Ox U 527 A | Kuma~rasambhava chaps 2 and 6 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 254 (254) Dictionaries, &c Pr 1090 B | Serbo-Croatian verb dictionary Njegos Ox U 382 A | Selected works Orwell, George (translations) Ox A 1102 A | 1984 (in Croatian) Ox A 1098 A | 1984 (in Serbian) Ox A 1103 A | 1984 (in Slovenian) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 255 (255) Anonymous Ox U 383 A | El Cid Ox U 670 B | Lazarillo de Tormes (four editions) Ox U 528 A | Libro de cirugia de Teodorico Collections, corpora &c Pr 1091 A | BYU contemporary Spanish corpus Dictionaries, &c Ca 833 A | Catalogo de las publicaciones periodicas Madrilenas Alonso XII Ma A 384 D | General estoria (part 1) Bible Pr 1092 E | Reina Valera version Caldero*n de la Barca, C. Ca 840 A | En la vida tode es verdad y toda mentir Machado, M. Ca 838 A | Complete works Ca 839 A | Poes^m*as Opera Omnia Lyrica, second edition Vallejo, C. Ca 837 A | Collected verse de Castro, Rosal^m* Ox A 656 A | Poes^m* completa en galego From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 256 (256) Collections, corpora &c Ox A 385 B | Newspaper extracts From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 257 (257) Anonymous Ox U 387 C | Modern prose (samples from literary texts and newspapers) Ca 834 A | Transcription of speech, play, and literary material Agaoglu, Adalet Ox U 286 A | Yu]ksek gerilim Fu]ruzan Ox U 254 A | Parasiz Yatili Gu]nes, Islak Ox U 285 A | Hula kutlu Karaosmanoglu, Yakup Kadri Ox U 272 A | Yaban Lewis, Geoffrey Ox A 391 A | Turkish grammar Makal, Mahmut Ox U 284 A | Kuru Sevda From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 258 (258) Dictionaries, &c Pr 1095 B | Uzbek-English dictionary From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 259 (259) Anonymous Ox A 655 A | Peredur Bible Ox A 566 A | Y testament newydd Brytyt, Kyndelw Ca 830 A | Collected Poems From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 260 (260) Dictionaries, &c Pr 1093 C | Dictionaries of several Central Americanlanguages Pr 1096 B | Qatabanian Inscriptions (ed Ricks) From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 261 (261) Collections, corpora &c Ox U 1038 A | Essen corpus of German folksong melodies Ox A 514 D | The Tyneside linguistic survey corpus Dictionaries, &c Ox U 423 D | Chinese telegraphic code character set Bach, Johann Sebastian Ox U 650 A | Well-tempered clavier 1 & 2 (Hewlett encoding) Fletcher, J.M. Ox A 692 B | Tree-ring dating of oak, AD 416-1687 Howgego, C.J. Ox U 593 C | Greek Imperial Countermarks From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 262 (262) Site list--------------------------------------------------- This lists all site codes used in the current snapshot together with names, addresses and electronic mail contact if known Please send any corrections to ARCHIVE @ UK.AC.OX.VAX Computing Centre for the Humanities Boks 53 - Universitetet Bergen N-5027 Norway Major holdings : English Boks 53 -Universitetet Bergen N-5027 Norway Major holdings : Norwegian I.K.P. Poppelsdorfer Allee 47 Bonn I D-5300 W. Germany Major holdings : German Literary & Linguistic Computing Centre U Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA U Copenhagen Njalsgade 76 Copenhagen DK-2300 Denmark Major holdings : Icelandic U Goteborg Sprakdata 6 N. Allegatan Goteborg 41301 Sweden Major holdings : Swedish Thesaurus Linguae Graecae U California at Irvine Irvine CA 92717 USA Major holdings : Greek Academy of the Hebrew Language Giv'at Ram P.O. Box 3449 Jerusalem, 91 034 Israel Major holdings : Hebrew I.N.L. Postbus 132 Leiden 2300 AC Netherlands Major holdings : Dutch Packard Humanities Institute 300 Second Street Los Altos CA USA Major holdings : Latin Universite* Catholique de Louvain Louvain la Neuve B-1348 Belgium Major holdings : Latin U Wisconsin D Spanish 1120 Van Hise Hall Madison WI 53706 USA Major holdings : Medi^aval Spanish Inst. fur Deutsche Sprache Friedrich-Karl Str. 12 Mannheim 1 D-6800 Germany Major holdings : German Universite* de Nancy 44 ave de la Libe*ration CO 3310 Nancy-Ce*de*x F 54014 France Major holdings : French D Religious Studies Box 36 College Hall U Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104-6303 USA Major holdings : Biblical texts Ist di linguistica computazionale U of Pisa via della faggiola Pisa I-56100 Italy Major holdings : Italian Brigham Young University Provo, Ut. USA Maths & Computer Science Building Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52100 Israel Major holdings : Hebrew From: LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: catalogue Date: 27-AUG-1987 16:57:06 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 263 (263) An apology to any humanist whose mailbox recently collapsed under the unanticipated bulge of a draft copy of the Text Archive Snapshot. This was not intended for mass dissemination (apart from being indecently large it had a number of minor errors still uncorrected), but the note in which I informed Central Control of this fact appears to have gone AWOL. Anyway a new version (with those errors corrected and some new as yet undetected ones introduced) is now available on request as before. UK Humanists will be able to read it on HUMBUL shortly, and I hope it will also be available from the ListServer at FAFSRV within a few days. Lou Burnard From: Willard McCarty Subject: Now We Are 100 Date: 28 August 1987, 14:07:47 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 264 (264) For those of you who retain a trace or more of respect for numbers, today is to be celebrated, since for the first time HUMANIST has 100 members. (I still count 9 countries; may that number increase!) Unfortunately champagne cannot be passed around electronically. You are therefore obliged to drink alone to the continued health of our thriving group this (on my side of the international dateline) Friday or (for our New Zealand members) Saturday evening. L'chaim! From: Willard McCarty Subject: Date: 28 August 1987, 22:02:42 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 265 (265) Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Second Supplement Following are 21 additional entries and updates to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to MCCARTY at UTOREPAS.BITNET. W.M. 28 August 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 266 (266) *Barnard, David T. Head, Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6; 613-545-6056 My research interests are in communication systems, information systems, and literary applications. In the latter area, I collaborate with George Logan (English) and Bob Crawford (Computing Science). Our joint work has involved development of coding standards for documents being used in textual analysis, investigation of text structures for electronic books, and some preliminary work toward building an archive based on our encoding standard. I have just completed a five-year term as Director of Computing and Communications Services. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 267 (267) *Baumgarten, Joseph M. I teach Rabbinic Literature, Dead Sea Scrolls, and related subjects at the Baltimore Hebrew College, 5800 Park Heights Ave, Baltimore, Md. 21215. Aside from using a Compaq computer for word processing in English and Hebrew, I am especially interested in CD-ROM's for accessing biblical and rabbinic sources in the manner of TLG. I am awaiting the results of the CCAT program to enable access to CD ROMs with IBM type computers. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 268 (268) *Beckwith, Sterling 248 Winters College, York University, 4700 Keele St., North York, Ontario (416) 736-5142 or 5186. I teach Music and Humanities at York University, have instigated and taught the only Humanities course dealing with computers that is currently offered there, under the rubric of Technology, Culture and the Arts, and serve as coordinator of computer music and general nuisance on academic computing matters in both the Faculty of Arts and of Fine Arts at York. I was the first researcher in an Ontario university to work intensively on the design of educational microworlds (for exploring and creating musical structures) using the then-obscure and still-poorly-exploited computing language known as LOGO. This led to my present interest in discovering what today's AI languages and methods can offer as vehicles and stimulating playgrounds for music-making and other kinds of artistic and intellectual creation. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 269 (269) *Bing, George 154 Thalia St., Laguna Beach, CA 92651; Phone: (213) 820-9410 I am a student at UCLA, and I work for the Humanities Computing program here to support the computer needs of the Humanities departments. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 270 (270) *Brainerd, Barron Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 1A5 I am professor of mathematics and linguistics. My particular professional interests are in quantitative stylistics (using for the most part statistical methods) and early modern English. I have an Apple at home and an XT at the university and program naively in Basic and Snobol. I access SPSSX, which among other thing i use in my course 'Statistics for Linguists,' via CMS. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 271 (271) *Burnard, Lou [note change of address, effective from 24th August ] I work at Oxford University Computing Service, where I am responsible for the Text Archive and for database support and design. I have designed and even written many bits of text processingn software, notably OCP, FAMULUS and recently a general purpose text-searching interface to ICL's CAFS hardware search engine. But I don't think academics should write software at that level any more; just good interfaces to standard backages such as INGRES (or other SQL compatible dbms), BASIS... My main enthusiasm remains database design, which I see as an important and neglected area of humanities computing. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 272 (272) *Church, Dan M. Associate Professor of French, Vanderbilt University Box 72, Station B, Nashville, TN 37235, (615) 322-6904 (office), (615) 292-7916 (home) I have produced computer-assisted learning exercises for elementary French courses and a database containing information on all plays produced in state-subsidized decentralized theaters in France since World War II. And I have plans for many more projects using computers in the Humanities. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 273 (273) *Erdt, Terrence Graduate Dept. of Library Science, Villanova University, Villanova PA 19085, ph. (215) 645-4688. My interests, at this point in time, can be said to be optical character recognition, scholar's workstation, and the computer as medium from the perspective of the field of popular culture. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 274 (274) *Gold, Gerald L. Department of Anthropology, York University, North York, Ont. M3J1P3; (416) 225 8760 (home); (416) 736 5261 (office) I am a cultural anthropologist and a Metis (half-humanities/half-social sciences . I have developed an interest in the relationship of qualitative and quantitative data. More specifically, how can a computer assist with the storage and retrieval of field notes, archival materials, interviews, life histories and other textual materials. Of specific interest is the preservation of the intrinsic character of narrative while using the computer as an analytical tool that can assist in statistical overviews and tabulation. In this sense, I am thinking beyond 'content analysis' which limits the qualitative side of data recovery. Some of my solutions are relatively simple, but I would like to discuss them and get feedback from others. More important, I am open to the suggestions and proposals that may reach my terminal. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 275 (275) *Goldfield, Joel D. Assistant Professor of French, Plymouth State College, Plymouth, NH 03264 USA My exposure to computers began in Saturday morning courses offered to ambitious high school students. I took FORTRAN 4 and "Transistor Electronics" in the early 1970's. The FORTRAN 4 manual was poorly written and the language itself seemed almost totally worthless for my musical and communications-oriented interests, so I summarily forgot it and paid more attention to French, literature, science and math, all of which seemed more useful. Also, some of my home electronic projects worked, some not, just like computer programs, as I later discovered. Although I majored in Comp. Lit. (French, German, Music) in College, I took a few math courses and had to complete computer assignments in BASIC, invented by a couple of genial professors in the same department. The son of the major architect was to be one of my "students" that summer when I served as an undergraduate teaching assistant on a language study abroad program in Bourges, France. How I ever successfully completed those BASIC programs on figuring probabilities for coinciding birth dates, etc., I'll never know. Most of what I wrote was based on "Euclid's Advanced Theorum," as we called it on our high school math team: "trial and error." For my doctoral degree at Universit'e de Montpellier III, I found that I needed to catalogue, sort and evaluate the distribution of vocabulary in a particular work of fiction in order to better understand the author's strange symbolic system and diachronic mixing of associated terms. I also discovered a French frequency dictionary that would supply an apparently valid and reliable norm for external comparison with the work's internal norms. Although my return to the States made on-line querying impossible, I was able to obtain a printout of all words, since, happily, the work had been included in the frequency dictionary's compilation. I learned as much of "C" and "awk" (a "C" derivative under the UNIX system) as I needed to write programs to complement UNIX utilities. A colleague in Academic Computing graciously "tutored" me on many esoteric aspects of UNIX that were, and probably still are, obscure in its documentation. I worked on a methodology to organize my word, stylistic, and thematic data for computer-assisted research. Without this need and organizational "forthought" that also evolved as I learned more and more about the utilities and languages, all programming fireworks would have been useless sparkles. My major academic interests are computer-assisted literary research applied to literary criticism, computer-assisted language instruction/ interactive video, foreign language teaching methodologies and excellent foreign language/culture teaching. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 276 (276) *Hockey, Susan Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN England; telephone: +44 865 273226 After taking a degree in Oriental Studies (Egyptian with Akkadian) at Oxford University I started my career in computing in the humanities as a programmer/advisor at the Atlas Computer Laboratory which at that time was providing large scale computing facilities for British Universities. There in the early 1970's I wrote programs to generate non-standard characters on a graph-plotter and was involved with the development of version 2 of the COCOA concordance program. In 1975 I moved to Oxford and began to develop various services for computing in the humanities which are used by other universities, including Kurzweil optical scanning, typesetting with a Monotype Lasercomp and the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP). I am in charge of these facilities and also teach courses on literary and linguistic computing and on SNOBOL. My publications include two books, based on my courses, and articles on various aspects of humanities computing including concordance software, Kurzweil scanning, typesetting, past history and future developments. I am also series editor for an Oxford Unviersity Press series of monographs, Oxford Studies in Computing in the Humanities. I have lectured on various aspects of humanities computing in various corners of the globe, more recently on current issues and future developments for humanities computing, Micro-OCP and its uses and on computers in language and literature for a more general audience. I have been a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford since 1979 and I now look after the computing interests in the college. My recent activities have been concerned with (1) Version 2 of the Oxford Concordance Program and Micro-OCP. (2) The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing of which I am currently Chairman and am on the editorial committee of the ALLC's journal, Literary and Linguistic Computing. My next project will be concerned with the introduction of computers in undergraduate courses at Oxford. These courses consist almost entirely of the detailed study of set texts, and this project, which is funded under the UK government Computers and Teaching Initiative, will set up a University-wide system for analysis of these texts via IBM-PC workstations linked to a large VAX cluster at the central service. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 277 (277) *Hunter, C. Stuart: and to a related study of the impact of the translations of the Psalms on the development of the religious poetry of the renaissance in England. On the teaching side, I am actively involved not only in teaching basic courses in word processing and database applications in the Humanities but also in developing computer conferencing as a specific teaching tool. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 278 (278) *Koch, Christian < FKOCH%OCVAXA@CMCCVB > or < chk@oberlin.edu.csnet > Oberlin College, Computer Science Program, 223D King Building, Oberlin, OH 44074; Telephone: (216)775-8831 or (216)775-8380 I think it might be fair to say that I'm the token humanist on the computer science faculty here at Oberlin -- and I love the work. I come to computing from a long and eclectic background in the humanities. Am one of those people who always harbored the hope that a strong interdisciplinary background would ultimately serve a person in good stead. I think that now, working in the general area of cognitive science and computing, I'm probably as close to realizing that hope as I have ever been. My undergraduate work was in the Greek and Roman classics to which I added a masters degree in music history with pipe organ performance and another in broadcasting and film art. Ph.D. (1970) was essentially in literary criticism with psychoanalytic emphasis. Computing skills were picked up on the side during the 80's. Have also recently taken time out from the academic scene to work as a therapist with the Psychiatry Department of the Cleveland Clinic. Although I've been at Oberlin for some years, I joined the computer science faculty only in 1986 and am still sorting out directions and options. My computing interests are currently in the general area of natural language understanding, more specifically systems of knowledge representation and processing. As a kind of pet project I am working on developing an expert system for specialized psychiatric diagnoses. At the more practical level, in addition to teaching some traditional CS courses, I am charged with developing programming courses aimed at the student who wishes to combine computer programming skills with a major in a non- computer science area. In the immediate future is the offering of a course dealing with the computer analysis of literary texts. Am also introducing a more theoretical course in the general area of mind and machine (cognitive science overview). Would much appreciate hearing from persons who would like to share experiences or make suggestions in these areas as well as in areas where computing may be involved in the analysis of 'texts' in music (computer-assisted Heinrich Schencker?) and the other arts. All ideas having to do with interesting ways of combining computer programming and other traditionally non-quantitative areas of study would be most welcome. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 279 (279) *Kraft, Robert A. Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania 215-898-5827 Coordinator of External Services for CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts), co-director of the CATSS project (Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies), director of the Computerized Coptic Bible project, chairman of the CARG (Computer Assisted Research Group) of the Society of Biblical Literature, editor of OFFLINE column in the RELIGIOUS STUDIES NEWS (dealing with computers and religious studies). BA and MA Wheaton (Illinois) College 1955 and 1957 (Biblical Lit.); PhD Harvard 1961 (Christian Origins). Assistant Lecturer in New Testament at University of Manchester (England) 1961-63; thereafter at University of Pennsylvania. Main interests are in ancient texts, especially Jewish and Christian, paleography, papyrology, codicology, and in the historical syntheses drawn from the study of such primary materials. The computer provides a fantastic shortcut to traditional types of research, and invites new kinds of investigation and presentation of the evidence. I am especially anxious to integrate graphic and textual aspects (e.g. in paleographical and manuscript studies), including scanning and hardcopy replication. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 280 (280) *Kruse, Susan I am a Computer Advisor within the Humanities Division of the Computing Centre at King's College London. Although many Universities in Britain increasingly have a person within the Computer Centre who deals with humanities' enquiries, King's College is unique in having a Humanities Division. There are eight of us within the division, some with specific areas of expertise (e.g. databases, declarative languages) and others (like myself) who deal with general issues. Some of us are from computer backgrounds; others, like myself, are from a humanities background (in my case archaeology). We cater to all users within the College, but specialise in providing a service for staff and students in the arts and humanities. This primarily involves advising, teaching, and writing documentation. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 281 (281) *Logan, Grace R. Arts Computing Office, PAS Building, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. I received my B.A. at Pennsylvania State University in 1956 and my M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in English in 1960. My training in computing has been largely an apprenticeship supplemented by courses at Waterloo in math and computing. I am now a consultant and programmer for the Arts Computing Office at the University of Waterloo where I have been since 1970. I have been associated with computing in the humanities since 1958 and I helped to organize the Arts Computing office at Waterloo in the early seventies. I was a member of the organizing committee for ICCH/3. I am active in the ACH and OCCH where I am serving on the executive committees. I have also been active in the MLA where I have served as the convenor of the computer section. I have developed program packages for use by Arts users and I have taught courses in computer literacy for the Arts Faculty at Waterloo. I regularly attend computing conferences where I have presented several papers. I have also been invited to give several seminars and workshops on computing in the Arts by various groups and organizations. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 282 (282) *Sinkewicz, Robert E. Senior Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, member of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the University of Toronto. Principal Interests: the use of relational databases in humanities research, and the development of text databases in Byzantine religious literature. Major Research in Progress: The Greek Index Project, an information access system for all extant Greek manuscripts. By Sept. 1988 we propose to have online a relatively complete listing of all Greek manuscripts as well as manuscript listings for authors of the Late Byzantine Period. IBM SQL/DS is our principal software tool. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 283 (283) *Sitman, David Computation Centre, Tel Aviv University, Israel I teach courses in the use of computers in language study and I am an advisor on computer use in the humanities. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 284 (284) *Tompa, Frank Wm. Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 I am an interested outsider. My fields of research include the development of mathematical logic in the 19th century (which in a way made modern computation possible), and problems confronting cognitive science (i.e. questions concerning the limits of the applicability of our current conception of computation). On the applied side, the University of Waterloo has long been a leader in software development, and in the area of computer application. As a result, we have had ready access to powerful computing resources for many years. I, for instance, have been processing my words since the early '70s (when IBM's ATS was in vogue, and VDTs were a novelty). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 286 (286) *Winder, Bill [Accents are indicated as follows: \C = caret; \G = grave; \A = acute.] As a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto's French Department, my computing activities are largely conditioned by my thesis topic: "Maupassant: predictability in narrative". The fundamental axis of this research concerns automatic abstracting: in precisely what way can automatic abstracting techniques be said to fail with literary texts? Maupassant's 310 short stories were chosen as the literary corpus primarily because the format of the genre is computationally manageable on a microcomputer, the plot and style of Maupassant's stories are straightforward, and the number of stories allows for statistically relevant comparisons between pieces. My research on abstracting should offer the basis for a coherent approach to critical model building, particularly with respect to the semantic value of predictability in text and in the critical model itself. This endeavour has led me to Deredec, (Turbo) Prolog, and, more recently, Mprolog. The use of the first of these is presented in CHum's issue on France, where J.-M. Marandin discusses "Segthem", a Deredec automatic abstracting procedure. My interest in Prolog, as an alternative to Deredec, developed out of studies in combinatory logic, natural deduction, and Peirce's existential graphs. In connection with my research in literary computing, I am a teaching assistant for the French Department's graduate computer applications course, and in that capacity have taught word processing and demonstrated packages such as Deredec, BYU concordance, TAT (my own French concordance package), COGS, and MTAS. This recent interest in computing (1985) grew out of seasoned interest in semiotics (1979). In France, I completed a Ma\Citrise de Lettres Modernes (1982) with the Groupe de S\Aemiotique in Perpignan, and a Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies (1984) with A. J. Greimas's Groupe de Recherche en S\Aemio- linguistique at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. I am presently a member of the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and served in June 1987 as secretary to the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies, site of a promising encounter between researchers in artificial intelligence, semiotics, and humanities computing. This encounter is in fact indicative of my overall ambition in computing, which is to assess the computational component of semiotic theories, particularly those of L. Hjelmslev and C. S. Peirce. From: Willard McCarty Subject: Hyperties: a "hypertext" system Date: 29 August 1987, 17:40:48 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 287 (287) Following is a brief description of a hypertext system that Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science, Maryland) has recently announced. I pass it on to you bcecause I think that the idea of hypertext is potentially of great interest to designers of software in our area. Anyone who has a description of the similar work that has gone on at Brown might consider posting here also. From: mbb@portia.Stanford.EDU Subject: Spelling checkers for non-English languages Date: Fri, 04 Sep 87 13:42:38 -0800 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 288 (288) Hi all, I am looking for recommendations on spell checking programs for non-English languages that run on either the Mac or IBM PC compatibles. I'm primarily interested in the romance languages (especially German), as well as Russian. Please send me a note if you've any suggestions or recommendations. Send directly to me (gx.mbb@stanford), and I'll summarize the responses I receive to the Humanist list. many thanks Malcolm Brown Stanford University From: LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: Text Archive - Change of Address Date: 5-SEP-1987 13:22:05 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 289 (289) Please note that all correspondence, enquiries etc concerning the Oxford Text Archive should be sent to the following address:- ARCHIVE @ UK.AC.OX.VAX (JANET) From BITNET, make sure that your Mailer is constructing the TO: part of the header correctly (it should say ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OX.VAX ) and forwarding the message to MAILER @ UKACRL.BITNET From EDU (etc), the address is now ARCHIVE%VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK @ UCL.CS.NSS There have been several changes in our connexion to the international networks recently; old methods of connecting with us may suddenly cease to work. Lou Burnard P.S. Please do not send Text Archive enquiries to this address (LOU@OX.VAX) unless you want them to be ignored until November! I shall be in Germany (try MIG04W@DGOWD01.EARN) until that date, but messages to ARCHIVE will still be acted on. In line with Humanist Traditions, I had intended to send everyone 98 annoucements of this fact, but time alas precluded. From: LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: Date: 5-SEP-1987 13:36:27 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 290 (290) ======CORRECTED VERSION OF PREVIOUS MESSAGE================ Please note that all correspondence, enquiries etc concerning the Oxford Text Archive should be sent to the following address:- ARCHIVE @ UK.AC.OX.VAX (JANET) From BITNET, make sure that your Mailer is constructing the TO: part of the header correctly (it should say either ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX@AC.UK or ARCHIVE@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK) and forwarding the message to MAILER @ UKACRL.BITNET From EDU (etc), the address is now ARCHIVE%VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK @ UCL.CS.NSS There have been several changes in our connexion to the international networks recently; old methods of connecting with us may suddenly cease to work. Lou Burnard P.S. Please do not send Text Archive enquiries to this address (LOU@OX.VAX) unless you want them to be ignored until November! I shall be in Germany (try MIG04W@DGOWD01.EARN) until that date, but messages to ARCHIVE will still be acted on. In line with Humanist Traditions, I had intended to send everyone 98 annoucements of this fact, but time alas precluded. (but I managed two at least) From: "Robin C. Cover" Subject: Generalized (Descriptive) Markup Language for Lexica Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1987 20:52 CST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 291 (291) Is anyone else working with SGML or other descriptive markup language for tagging digitized lexicons? I have seen the AAP manuals implementing SGML for electronic publishing, but this still leaves room for many decisions, including which features of SGML to actually implement, and whether to abbreviate some of the more cumbersome tagging. If you can offer advice or help for tagging lexica, please notify me via BITNET or postal mail: Robin C. Cover; 3909 Swiss Avenue; Dallas, TX 75204; 214/824-3094 (w); 214/296-1783 (h) From: Randall Jones Subject: COPYRIGHT AND TEXT FILES Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1987 22:25 MDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 292 (292) One issue that has not been adequately discussed with regard to the exchange of literary texts is that of copyright. This may not be a significant problem in other countries, but it is very real in the U.S. Virtually every edition of a literary text worth coding in electronic form is protected by copyright law. While most scholars do not worry about obtaining permission from the publisher for work that is done internally, permission must be secured in order to publish a concordance, index, etc. based on that edition. I can see potential problems if texts that were originally intended for internal use suddenly begin to be exchanged around the world. We have secured copyright permission from publishers for several texts we have been working on here at Brigham Young University (e.g. the Hamburg Edition of Goethe), and we are well aware that the permission does not grant us the right to pass on the electronic version to other users. Perhaps we can negotiate with Beck in Munich for this permission, but I am not optimistic that they will be positively disposed toward the idea. Any other thoughts? Randall Jones Humanities Research Center Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602 From: Randall Jones Subject: REGOGNITION FOR COMPUTER PROGRAMS Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1987 22:27 MDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 293 (293) If I may be allowed to resurrect the issue of recognition for computer programs, HUMANIST readers may be interested to learn that the Modern Language Association of America and the Center for Applied Linguistics have recently entered into an agreement with IBM to implement a system of peer review for language- oriented software written for IBM microcomputers and compatibles. The software may be for instruction or research in literature, writing, second language learning, or linguistics. Recommended software will be made available to the public through an independent software-distribution center. Authors will receive a royalty from the sale of their software, but, perhaps more important, they will receive a letter from the MLA or CAL informing them that their software has been selected to be made available for their colleagues, kind of a "seal of approval" from a recognized body. It may not mean as much as an article in a journal, but it certainly should carry some weight. To request additional information or a software submission form write to Carol Zuses, Software Evaluation Project, Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981 (for literature, writing and CALL other than ESL) or Barbara Robson, Software Evaluation Project, Center for Applied Linguistics, 1118 22nd St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20037 (for linguistics and ESL CALL). From: Mark Olsen Subject: ESL software and reviews Date: Tue, 08 Sep 87 15:33:16 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 294 (294) I am on the thesis committee of a student in the English as a Second Languge program who is looking into software for teaching English to a wide variety of students. His project calls for a review of the available software and literature dealing with computer use in ESL programs. This is a long way from my area of expertise and I am wondering if there are journals, bibliographies, or so on that would provide a useful starting point for a project of this nature. The student has already run through a number of journals including CALICO, but any additional title suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Mark Olsen From: Willard McCarty Subject: The ARTFL Bibliography Date: 9 September 1987, 12:32:12 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 295 (295) A bibliographical listing of the contents of a major database of French texts is now available to HUMANISTs. It is the work of a cooperative project of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Chicago and is known as the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). The file is 1900 80-character lines long. Because we do not yet have the facility for centralized storage of texts, I am keeping it in my account and will send a copy to anyone who wants it. Requests should come to me directly. Detailed information about ARTFL can be obtained from the ARTFL Project, The University of Chicago, Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures, 1050 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A., (312) 962-8488. I do not know if the Project has an e-mail address. From: "Timothy W. Seid" Subject: WORD DIVISION OF ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS Date: Wed, 09 Sep 87 15:24:54 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 296 (296) My professor, Dr. Stanley Stowers, came to me one day with the idea of a computer program that would be able to generate the possible word divisions in a Greek text. Since ancient Greek was written in a continuous script until about the ninth century A.D., the word divisions in our critical texts are based on later interpretive editing. I shuttered at the thought of what would be involved in programming such a thing. Then one day while I was working with the TLG texts I came up with an idea. We at Brown are using a system called Isocrates to access TLG. Rather than searching through the texts themselves, Isocrates has an index to each author and an index to the entire corpus. Isocrates was developed by Greg Crane at Harvard in conjunction with the Institute for Research in Scholarship at Brown. (of course, all due credit to Dr. Brunner). My idea was to generate a sequence of strings from a Greek text and match each time to a file of Greek words. I have finally complete a working version on the mainframe. For the first version I've used the word file to the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) since it was the easiest to get to in the Isocrates files. Here is a sample of the output for Galatians 1:6-8: LINE 6 ______ qauma qaumazw a ma a zw w o oti ti iou o ou outw outws w ws ta taxews a ew ews w ws me met meta ta a ti tiqesqe qes qesqe ea a ap apo pot potou o otou to tou o ou ouk kale a esan sa san a ant to o os su umas ma a as en xariti a ar ti xristou to tou o ou ei eis eteron te ro o on eu a ge ion o on noo LINE 7 ______ o o ou ouk esti estin ti tina in ina a all allo o ei mh mhti h ti tines in esei ei eis eisi eisin sin in o oi ta tarassontes a ar ara aras a as son o on ontes te su umas ma a as kai a ai qel- ontes o on ontes te me met meta metastreyai ta tas a as a ai to o eu a ge ion o on to tou o ou oux xristou to tou o ou LINE 8 ______ a all alla a kai a ai aie ea ean a anh nh h hmeis me ei eis ish sh sha h a aggelos ge elos o os ec o ou our oura ouran a o ou eu a ge zh h ta a ai umin in par a ar ro o eu h ge elisa isa sa a me meq a umin in ina a ana anaq anaqema a qema ema ma a estw w I'm not sure how much explanation is needed or how much more I should tell. I'm not too optimistic that I will discover any places which could be divided up differently. I would appreciate any comments, suggestions, questions, or criticisms. Tim Seid From: CAMERON@EXETER.AC.UK Subject: CALL Conference EXETER Date: Wed, 09 Sep 87 19:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 297 (297) For all HUMANIST readers - accommodation still available if requested IMMEDIATELY. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PROGRAM STRUCTURE and PRINCIPLES in CALL Lopes Hall, September 21 -23 1987. COST 50 pounds all inclusive - pro rata rates available MONDAY September 21 16.30 - 18.00 Registration 18.00 Reception 19.00 Dinner 20.15 S.Dodd (Exeter) CALL and the chalkface. D.F.Clarke, (U.E.A.) Design considerations in the production of extended computer assisted reading materials TUESDAY September 22 08.00 Breakfast 09.30 P.Hickman, (La Ste Union) Structuring interactive grammar practice programs. D.Ferney, (Wolverhampton Poly.) A computer model of the French native speaker's skill with grammatical gender. 10.45 Coffee 11.15 O.Durrani, (Durham) Designer Labyrinths: Text mazes for language learners. A.Benwell, (Lanchester Poly.) How we use HELP facilities. 13.00 Lunch 14.30 A.Kukulska-Hulme, (Aston) Liberation or constraint : the useful- ness of a program interface to a vocabulary database. G.A.Inkster, (Lancaster) Databases as a learning activity. 15.45 Tea 16.15 Workshop : Reading Programs - D.F.Clarke (U.E.A.); I.Morris (Man chester Poly.). Language Programs - D.Ashead (B'ham); O.Durrani (Durham). Wordprocessing aid - L.M.Wright (Bangor) 18.30 Wine reception 19.00 Dinner 20.15 J.D.Fox, (U.E.A.) Can CAL aid vocabulary acquisition? L.M.Wright, (UC, Bangor) Aspects of text storage and text compression in CALL. WEDNESDAY September 23 08.00 Breakfast 09.30 D.Scarborough (City London Poly.) The computer as a teaching resource on a Commercial French course. J.E.Galletly (Buckingham) Elementary verbal phrase syntax- checker for French sentences. 10.45 Coffee 11.15 Workshop: Language programs : M.Blondel (City London Poly.); B.Farrington (Aberdeen); P.Hickman (La Ste Union); D.Ferney (Wolverhampton); M.L'Huillier (Brunel). 13.00 Lunch 14.15 B.Farrington, (Aberdeen) A.I. Grandeur et servitude M.Yazdani, (Exeter) Tools for second language teaching. Future projects. 15.45 Tea KCCameron/EXETER Tel.0392 - 264216 From: "Bill Winder (416) 960-9793" Subject: Date: 9 September 1987, 18:51:28 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 298 (298) I have 2 questions that the Humanist group may be able to help me with. First, does anyone know of a good archive management tool? I'm looking for something that a library can use to index all its stock, whether it be books, maps, photographs, manuscripts, painting, statues, etc. One suggestion was Revelation, but users of the package that I have contacted don't recommend it. Dbase might seem appropriate, but the fixed field length is a problem when dealing with an extremely heterogeneous data set. I thought of AskSam -- a textbase -- but I was hoping to find something designed for archives. Any suggestions? Secondly, I'm trying to find the list of network nodes in Athens, Greece. Are there no Athenian Humanists? A colleague in Athens would like to have access to EARN (the European network) but doesn't know where a node mainframe is in Athens. (I was able to find the University of Patras in the CMS Help, but no connection date is indicated, nor site -- I'm not sure whether it is in Athens or not.) Many thanks, Bill Winder (Winder at Utorepas) From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster Subject: bibliographic databases, network nodes in Greece Date: 10 September 1987 09:32:48 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 299 (299) On Bill Winder's questions: Second question first: Our Bitnet tables show exactly two nodes in Greece: GREARN in Crete and CRPATVX1 at the University of Patrus. Database question next: Depending on what you are looking for in a database system, you may want to check Revelation out again despite the reports you've gotten. It has variable-length fields, great flexibility, and appears to combine many of the strengths of the relational data model without its rigidity. Its three major drawbacks, according to a knowledgeable, enthusiastic fanatic on the subject, are its documentation, its documentation, and its documentation. I've heard this report elsewhere too so I believe it. By all reports the program itself is very very good -- if one can put up with the manual. For general-purpose work on an IBM PC (that seems to be a hidden specification in your search), I believe anyone ought to look long and hard at RBase System V and DataEase. The one leans to power and the other to ease of use for beginners and occasional users, but each is very good. I served on an evaluation committee that spent months looking at programs, ads, and specs, and then a full week performing tests and sample database designs on a few finalists, and these two programs were clearly at the top. There are also a number of programs aimed strictly at bibliographies, which may prove ideal for your application: Professional Bibliographic Systems in Ann Arbor Michigan has a rather nice program that implements the ANSI standard for bibliographic description and can handle the problem you have with non-standard media very easily. There are others, of course, but I don't know enough to say anything useful. Perhaps others on the list will comment on Sci-Mate, Notebook II, and so on. (This messages has 47 lines.) From: Willard McCarty Subject: A sin of omission & work in progress Date: 11 September 1987, 20:43:26 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 300 (300) When I advertised the ARTFL bibliography (of which several copies have subsequently been sent out), I failed to note that Mark Olsen was responsible for securing it for us. My apologies and thanks to him for supplying the sort of thing that makes HUMANIST valuable. Lou Burnard's snapshot of the Oxford Text Archive is another example. Work still proceeds on centralized storage of such things on the UTORONTO node for automatic retrieval on demand. Please be patient. Meanwhile, I'll be happy to distribute the ARTFL bibliography and anything else appropriate. If you have something you think might appeal to HUMANISTs, let me know. From: Willard McCarty Subject: The Humanities Computing Yearbook Date: 14 September 1987, 07:24:34 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 301 (301) On behalf of Oxford University Press, the publishers, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities is pleased to announce a new periodical, The Humanities Computing Yearbook. Ian Lancashire and Willard McCarty are the co-editors. An editorial board is in process of being set up. The first volume, scheduled for publication in the summer of 1988, aims to give a comprehensive guide to publications, software, and specialized hardware organized by subject or area of application. Research and instructional work in many fields will be covered: ancient and modern languages and literatures, linguistics, history, philosophy, fine art, and areas of computational linguistics affecting text-based disciplines in the humanities. The more notable software packages will be described in some detail. We welcome your suggestions of what we should consider. We are especially interested in discovering innovative software that may not be widely known, including working prototypes of systems in development. Electronic correspondence should be sent to YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS.BITNET, conventional mail to the Editors, The Humanities Computing Yearbook, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Univ. of Toronto, 14th floor, Robarts Library, 130 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5. Our telephone number is (416) 978-4238. Please feel free to distribute this notice. Ian Lancashire Willard McCarty 14 September 1987 From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: ARTFL Date: Monday, 14 September 1987 2234-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 302 (302) Concerning the ARTFL Project and materials, it would be useful for HUMANIST to carry details of how institutions can become subscribers to this data bank, if this has not already been done. It is my impression that costs are reasonable and benefits great for Romance Language departments, although I'm not sure that the French people at my own institution have taken advantage of the situation yet. Is there an ARTFL spokesperson on HUMANIST to give precise details? (Or to repeat them, if I missed it at first.) Bob Kraft From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Copyright Date: Monday, 14 September 1987 2301-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 303 (303) Apropos Randy Jones' important query/note about the copyright issue, much thought has necessarily been given to these matters by those involved in encoding ancient texts en masse, particularly the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) project directed by Ted Brunner at U.California Irvine, and the newly formed Latin counterpart being coordinated at the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) under the direction of Stephen Waite in Los Altos, CA. It is also a central issue for CCAT in gathering various materials for a CD-ROM. We have found that some publishers are very interested in cooperation, especially if they can be made to see that having their material in electronic form can benefit them as well. Other publishers have adopted a go slow (or don't go) policy, since they have not yet thought much about the impact of computerized distribution on their materials. Still others are actively entering the computerized market, and thus reserve circulation rights to themselves. One lesson for authors and text editors is perhaps to attempt to retain copyright control for these purposes, or at least to recover the copyright if a publisher discontinues an author/editor's publication. I suspect that in the long run we will find that circulation of materials in electronic form increases the market for hard copy of the same materials (at least as present study and reading habits are constituted), but there is little hard evidence on which to test such a hypothesis, and many publishers are wary of what might happen with the increase of electronic distribution. Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Technical flaws Date: 16 September 1987, 07:04:30 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 304 (304) A HUMANIST just pointed out to me that on this VM/CMS system an uploaded file often ends with what appears to be a double quotation mark, <">. Whatever it is, it becomes an end-of-file marker (1A in hex) when that file gets downloaded to a PC. If the downloaded file has been made part of another file, the end-of-file marker may make the rest of the larger file inaccessible until it has been removed. (I hope this is clear!) So, if you download something from HUMANIST that ends abruptly or seems to be much shorter than the corresponding entry in the directory would lead you to believe, one or more spurious hex 1A's are likely at fault. I have used the Norton Utility to remove them, though until now I have not understood where they came from. If you encounter this problem with a file from HUMANIST and cannot solve it, please let me know. The second technical flaw I have to report concerns discursive headers, i.e., those that specify the sender's full name and may also give his or her address, telephone number, etc. At least from this VM/CMS system, some messages so adorned are oddly treated by other mailers, which may take the discursive part for the electronic address. As far as I know, ListServ has not run into this problem, but I have when sending messages directly to individuals. For this reason, my full header has become a footer. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: Philippa MW Matheson 416 585-4469 Subject: Re: Technical flawMy experience with the ~Z (hex 1A) character at the end of some messagesis that it is easier to remove while it is still on the mainframe (i.e.*before* bringing to the PC). If the apparent double quote character(") at the end of a message is deleted, the problem does not occur onthe PC. This makes a real incentive to a least browse through myHUMANIST mail on-line (before taking it home to print out and read on thebus on my way back to work...?) Date: 16 September 1987, 11:26:38 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 305 (305) Interesting, though, that I have had this problem only with Willard McCarty's contributions--perhaps it is purely local. Philippa Matheson AMPHORAS at UTOREPAS From: "Robin C. Cover" Subject: Offending EOF Characters Uploaded from MS-DOS (ascii) Files Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1987 12:13 CST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 306 (306) The offending EOF characters Willard has mentioned can be removed from a downloaded file with PC-Write (as well as with Norton Utilities). I think these must originate in MS-DOS files from some word processors when these text files are uploaded to the VM/CMS system. I have asked the mainframe operators if there is any way to eliminate these EOF characters from the (minidisk) file prior to downloading (with some global change), but the answer was "no." In general, the networks seem to handle hi-bit characters and control codes (1-32) in an irratic fashion...unless I am ignorant of some essential fact. I remove these EOF characters from downloaded files with PC-Write's alt-F4, alt-F6 sequence, which locates "non-ascii" (sic!) characters. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Announcements of new software & of updates Date: 18 September 1987, 10:08:50 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 307 (307) I would like to propose that HUMANIST be used to announce the availability of new software and of updates to existing packages, whether they be commercial or in the public domain. Advertising in the usual sense seems inappropriate for an academic network, but I think all of us would appreciate knowing about new things in a timely fashion. Until we have the ability to store files centrally, these announcements should probably be brief and should each contain an offer of more information from the sender. Only major updates would likely be of interest. Comments? Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A sample report on interesting software Date: 18 September 1987, 22:23:37 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 308 (308) Please consider the following technical report on CRITIQUE, an interesting example of work in natural language processing being done at the Watson Center of IBM. Many of you will of course already know about this work. I'm circulating the report primarily to suggest what we might publish on HUMANIST and to get your reactions. Please let me know directly what you think. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 309 (309) CRITIQUE CRITIQUE, formerly known as EPISTLE, is a mainframe natural language processing system being developed at the Thomas Watson Research Center of IBM. This system analyzes the syntactic structure of sentences, diagnoses lexical, grammatical, and stylistic errors, offers corrections, and computes various statistics about the writing. It is currently used in IBM both as a research tool, in open-ended research on semantic analysis, and as an aid in the writing of documentation. CRITIQUE consists of two major components: a parsing "engine" constructed by means of PLNLP, the "Programming Language for Natural Language Processing, pronounced "Penelope"; and PEG, the "PLNLP English Grammar." The other components of the system are the dictionary, which contains syntactic information associated with 70,000 lexical items, and the style component, which consists of style-checking rules. CRITIQUE begins by separating sentences from each other, then subjects each sentence serially to lexical analysis. Parts of speech are labelled at this stage and word-level errors determined. Successful sentences are fed to a parser that segments them according to a parse-tree and detects grammatical errors. Sentences still free of errors are then examined for stylistic weaknesses, which are reported to the user. CRITIQUE's criteria for style are based on existing manuals modified in consultation with teachers of composition and on errors collected from a large database of IBM office correspondence. Examples of stylistic weakness that CRITIQUE might report are: excessive length of a sentence, excessive complexity, or unclear punctuation. CRITIQUE deals with one sentence at a time. It does not currently keep track of what it regards as infractions or infelicities so as to produce criticism of the writing in general. In recent tests 70% of the sentences given to CRITIQUE were analyzed in a single parse; 15% required multiple parses and were ranked according to a metric of preferred interpretations; and 15% were "fitted" or indeterminate parses, as in sentence fragments. A 20-word sentence, for example, can be processed on an IBM 3081 4Mb virtual machine in 1 CPU-second. [This report is based on a talk given by Dr. Yael Ravin (Natural Language Processing Group, Thomas Watson Research Center) on 26 March at the University of Toronto and is republished from the Ontario Humanities Computing newsletter, 1.3, June 1987, with thanks.] From: Randall Jones Subject: Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1987 23:45 MDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 310 (310) Electronic Text Corporation of Provo, Utah has just announced release 4.2 of WordCruncher (formerly BYU Concordance). They have also announced the ETC Bookshelf Series, indexed texts that can be accessed by WordCruncher's ViewETC. Already available is a set of 47 U.S. Constitution documents. Soon to be released will be the Riverside Shakespeare and selected volumes of the Library of America (e.g. Twain, Melville, Franklin, Jefferson, Faulkner, Cather, etc.). For information about the new features in 4.2 as well as the ETC Bookshelf Series write (via BITNET 4) to me. Randy Jones From: CAMERON@EXETER.AC.UK Subject: Hum.Comp.Yrbook Date: Sun, 20 Sep 87 12:15:04 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 311 (311) Software Reviews - I'm in favour of general distribution of all reviews. Although users' needs are different, details of other progs can provide ideas of adaptation I should also like to see a Clearing House for details of projects in hand and of willingness to cooperate on development Keith Cameron, EXETER From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Reviews and information Date: 21 September 1987, 06:39:40 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 312 (312) The following is from Joseph Baumgarten, sent to me, and deserves to be passed on. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 313 (313) As a freshman in the learned circle of Humanist experts, I would greatly welcome the availability of current information about software. Yet, I think that specialized hardware also deserves mention. A specific example: We have had rave reviews of the capabilities of the Ibycus for accessing CD ROM data bases. Yet there are few users who can afford a computer which can do only this. Are there alternatives for users of standard computers? If so, what hardware and software is needed? Will the new generation of PCs be likely to approximate the capabilities of Ibycus? Another question in a different area: Is there any progress in the electronic indexing of periodicals in the humanities? Joseph M. Baumgarten (BAUMGARTEN@UMBC.BITNET) From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: responses to inquiries, etc. Date: Monday, 21 September 1987 0932-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 314 (314) It is difficult to know whether it is most practical to send separate notes to HUMANIST on separate items, or to package things as I am doing here. If there are strong feelings about this, it might be good to have a recommended policy. Doing separate notes may make it easier to organize what HUMANISTs wish to keep. In any event; 1. Brief information on hardware, software, etc., would be welcome via HUMANIST. For more elaborate treatment, including sometimes the source code of programs, Jack Abercrombie's ONLINE NOTES is an appropriate listing that goes out monthly to 200 or so e-mail addresses (write JACKA@PENNDRLS). Indeed, for informational purposes, the contents of such ONLINE NOTES and similar services could perhaps be listed in HUMANIST along with listings of other relevant e-mail sources. 2. More generally, on the information front, I would like response from HUMANISTs on how to reach the non-e-mail multitudes with what they need to know about computer related developments. For several years I have published a brief column (OFFLINE) in the main professional newsletter for Religious Studies, and I suspect that other professional society organs may have similar columns -- and that some professional groups do not. It is clear to me that many colleagues want such information and will not subscribe to the special computer publications (CHum, Scope, LLC, etc.) or join the associations that produce the special publications. These colleagues can be reached most easily through their own professional publications. But much of the information they need is not at all "discipline specific" so it occurred to me that perhaps we should encourage the creation of a "syndicated" column approach that we could offer to the various professional societies and editors for inclusion in newsletters, etc. It is one function that a consortium of professional societies might be interested in supporting. I would be interested in being involved, if the idea seems feasible and if others would also get involved, with their own professional groups in view. Responses? 3. Responding to Joseph Baumgarten's note, but with general information. Several HUMANISTs have first hand acquaintance with the IBYCUS System, I suspect, and I certainly do. It would be incorrect to describe the IBYCUS SC as capable ONLY of accessing CD-ROM material. It is an excellent all-around tool for scholarly, and especially textual, work. Its word processing capabilities are adequate and getting better. Its programming language (similar to C) is relatively transparent and powerful. Many programs of various sorts are available in this language (IBYX), which has been in use for nearly a decade by 15 centers and/or individuals who have owned the earlier (mini-computer based) versions of the IBYCUS System. We at CCAT hope to collect a utilities disk of such programs for the IBYCUS SC in the near future. An extensive review of the machine appeared in the inaugural issue of John Hughes' BITS AND BYTES REVIEW last October, and can be xeroxed for anyone interested. 4. For IBM DOS users, CCAT has been developing software for accessing the TLG and CCAT CD-ROMs from IBM type machines. We have worked with the Sony reader and interface card. This software will be available soon for testing, responses, etc., and will be sold for a nominal charge ($75 was announced) through CCAT. The attempt is to emulate IBYCUS for IBM. It will not be entirely successful since IBYCUS was built exactly for this sort of thing, IBM was not. But it should provide a reasonable alternative. Bob Kraft, CCAT From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 22 September 1987, 09:29:28 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 315 (315) The following, intended for HUMANIST, was addressed to the wrong Torontonian node of Bitnet/NetNorth -- a common mistake, easily made. Please note that although my account is on the UTOREPAS node, HUMANIST belongs to UTORONTO. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > 21 Sep 87 10:38:50 BST > Via: UK.AC.RL.EARN; Mon, 21 Sep 87 10:38:49 BST > Received: > Via: 000005121001.FTP.MAIL; 21 SEP 87 10:38:46 BST > Date: Mon 21 Sep 87 10:38 > From: D.MITCHELL@QMC.AC.UK > Message-ID: > To: HUMANIST@UTOREPAS > Subject: ATARI ST > > > Does anybody out there know if any software packages exist which will > produce concordances on an Atari St machine ? > > David Mitchell > D.MITCHELL @ UK.AC.QMC ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please address replies to the sender, not to HUMANIST. Thanks. From: mbb@jessica.Stanford.EDU Subject: Spell checking programs Date: Tue, 22 Sep 87 15:01:29 -0800 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 316 (316) A few weeks ago, I sent a note to HUMANIST requesting information on spell checking programs. Well, I received only a half-dozen responses, and nearly all of these contained no information but rather simply expressed interest in the outcome! Willard McCarty at UTOREPAS volunteered he was using a program named MicroSpell, but that was about it. Just as I was about to despair, in comes the latest issue of "Bits & Bytes Review," which contains reviews of four spell checking programs running in the DOS environment!! (Vol 1, #5) This is clearly the most comprehensive coverage of this subject, so anyone wanting to know about this stuff should read these reviews. Hughes reviews the following programs: JetSpell, which has the potential to check multilingual documents; MicroSpell, WordProof II, and Webster's NewWorld Spelling checker. As I say, the reviews are well done and make worthwhile reading if you want to find out about the latest and greatest in spell checking programs. Malcolm Brown Stanford University gx.mbb@stanford From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: An objection Date: 24 September 1987, 14:31:21 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 317 (317) A good friend and fellow HUMANIST sent me the following objection to a tendency possibly dormant in our recent efforts to begin circulating reviews and notices of software. This friend felt quite diffident about addressing HUMANIST with a passionate and frank objection, but I am persuaded that we need to hear it. From reactions I have received, I've concluded that one aspect of HUMANIST many of its members find most stimulating is the discussion of issues and ideas. It seems to me that we can both engage in these discussions and circulate software reviews. Comments on the following are welcome. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 318 (318) I was a little taken aback by your suggestion about HUMANIST and software reviews or notices. I am afraid of seeing HUMANIST change from a venue for interesting discussions of computing in general and specific issues relevant to humanities (such as desk-top publishing, copyright and machine-readable text, what students in the humanities are expected to learn by learning programming, etc.) to one largely dominated by exchange of news and gossip about the latest soft- and hard-ware, with the concomitant academic one-upsmanship, not to mention salesmanship. I realize that there is a place for HUMANIST as a locus from which information can be disseminated about new and important programs and machines, but I don't think it should become our focus. It seems to me that information about commercial programs is fairly well disseminated, and most of the other stuff seems precious (I mean it affects me as a woman preaching is supposed to have affected Dr. Johnson) or rather useless. I know that there is a solid "remnant" of useful stuff even as I say that, but I do think the chaff outweighs the wheat. Now you are free to (and perhaps would be wise to) dismiss this feeling as the amalgam of two rather unworthy emotions: a deep suspicion of all technological panaceas, especially those "silicon-based life-forms" which many humanities computer types seem to me to be peddling under the guise of parsers and "workbenches" and expert systems; and a self-contradictory but equally real jealousy of the technological fast-lane and those who have the knowledge and leisure to travel it. So I hope that your suggestion results in only a small rise in the amount of software reviews, announcements, etc. From: Mark Olsen Subject: A reply to the "nameless dissenter" Date: Thu, 24 Sep 87 21:38:44 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 319 (319) I am not certain that I understand the objection posed by the nameless dissenter. Information about commercially available software -- particularly that aimed at the humanities -- is VERY slow getting out and can be rather outdated. A personal story might be appropriate. Almost two years ago I reviewed a very good package aimed at humanities applications. I submitted the review and before it appeared a radically revised version was released. The nice guy that I am, I rewrote the review and sent in an essentially new piece. Again, before the review could appear, the company was sold, the name was changed and the product updated yet again. I have updated the review, it has not yet appeared and I have found that, yes, a "new improved" version has been released. Since most of the journals aimed at humanities processing are quarterly academic journals, they tend to have slow turn around times. This is fine for book reviews and articles, which do not change as rapidly as computer related products. In another review that I wrote, the developer phoned me several times while I was writing the review, and released updates in response to the criticisms I raised about the product! Willard's proposal to circulate software reviews to the members of HUMANIST would certainly permit limited distribution of the text while it is current. There is no reason, in my opinion, to assume that HUMANIST would become the realm of "right to silicon life" enthusiasts since most of the participants are active academics, not software developers, whose comments about availability and performance of programs are on the whole rarely self-serving or breach professional ethics of disclosing personal interest in a product. I am also rather shocked that the writer of this objection could eliminate non-commercial software from serious consideration. The SNOBOL and Icon projects at the University of Arizona, University of Toronto's MTAS and COGS, and numerous PD packages are examples of non-commercial software that is of high quality. Beyond packages, a number of scholars circulate specialized utilities, source code libraries, and other useful tools -- frequently free of charge (or for the cost of distribution). Few of these are EVER covered in the main computer press, but many are of particular interest to individuals involved in humanities processing. A far more serious problem that must be addressed is the issue of electronic publication. It is difficult, if not impossible, to convince journal editors and publishers to accept mss. that have appeared electronically, and even harder to have academic colleagues to accept electronic media as a serious form of publication. I should like to see HUMANIST act as a sort of electronic journal, if only to serve as a trial electronic academic publication forum. There is, in my opinion, no technical reason barring a fully electronic publication medium. Rather, it is going to take a major shift in what academics view as a substantial publication -- something that can be given whatever credit the piece deserves -- before the medium can be used. Until that time, HUMANIST cannot attract anything more than occaisonal commentary. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Russian texts Date: 25 September 1987, 11:04:47 EDTFri, 25 Sep 87 16:19 N X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 320 (320) The following query is from Harry Gaylord. Please send your replies to him directly, at the address given below. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have been trying to assemble Russian texts for students to work with in stylistics. Does anyone have suitable machine-readable material? I can offer in exchange M. Ju. Lermontov's Geroj Nasego Vremeni which we have keyed in. Harry Gaylord GALIARD@HGRRUG5 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Both an exchange of ideas and a review of software Date: 28 September 1987, 06:35:58 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 321 (321) Most recently two HUMANISTs argued about the appearance of software reviews and notices here. One was cautious about it, fearing an invasion of the marketplace; the other was much more positive. It is good to see that our philosophical "flaming" is appreciated. (Do I understand that word correctly? I mean "ardent discussion.") The plan to introduce reviews and notices on HUMANIST should not threaten the exchange of ideas, however. What's likely is that reviews and descriptions of software will be radically summarized for automatic distribution on HUMANIST, but that the full versions will be kept centrally and made available to individuals on request. If the summaries were to become burdensome, they could be moved to a central file, available only on request, but this seems unlikely. The Humanities Computing Yearbook, which I'm involved with, should make some of the posting of notices unnecessary, but HUMANIST will remain a timely place for new developments to be announced. If that's what you want. Comments? Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Flaming defined Date: 28 September 1987, 11:02:00 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 322 (322) Peter Roosen-Runge, a HUMANIST at nearby York University, has sent me the following learned exposition of the verb "to flame" and its related noun. Be it known that when I attributed flaming to fellow HUMANISTs I did so in utter ignorance of the history of the word -- a grievous scholarly fault for which I apologize. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From the Hacker's Dictionary (citing terms which came into use in the mid-70s or earlier) "FLAME v. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. FLAME ON: v. To continue to flame. See RAVE." But this meaning is now somewhat antiquated; "flame" began to be used as a term of self-derogation to protect oneself against the accusation of flaming. In the middle of an E-mail discussion, one might write FLAME ON FLAME OFF and continue in a less offensive manner. (Note the shift in meaning of the ON here to make possible the "FLAME OFF".) Another common use today is "No flames, please", i. e. don't bother to send criticisms, especially vehement ones. FLAME is rarely today used in its original sense to criticize someone else's utterances; instead, it is used to characterize the tone of an utterance, typically by its author, and as you suggested conveys a sense of warmth or vehemence. But a necessary ingredient now is that the FLAME *itself* be critical, indeed highly, irresponsibly, and even offensively critical. As Usenet developed, flames of this sort became very common and contributed so much "noise" to the discussions that they were confined to a group all their own, now known as talk.flame, I believe. I haven't read it for a while, but its existence is a great tribute to the net's dislike of censorship. From: Chuck Bush Subject: More on FLAMEs Date: Mon, 28 Sep 87 12:37:43 MDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 323 (323) As the BITNET "Postmaster" for our installation, I see lots of notes from other Postmasters complaining about BITNET and MAILER problems. Lately some have been trying to express the degree (pun intended) of their flames. I noticed one today that expressed it as "moderately high flames--microwave level 80%." Interesting, the versitility of this language we speak. Chuck Bush BYU Humanities Research Center From: A_BODDINGTON@VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK Subject: Flames ..... Date: 28-SEP-1987 20:44:54 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 324 (324) Taken (more or less verbatim) from NOTABLE COMPUTER NETWORKS, *Comm of the ACM*, 29, 10 1986, p 932-971 p 967 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the most obvious effects of networks is their tendency to induce users to "flame", that is, to produce many words on an uninteresting topic or in an abusive or ridiculous manner; "raving" is almost a synonym for flaming. The usual explanation for why computer networks tend to aggrevate flaming is that the flamer is isolated from the readers and has no negative feedback to inhibit such behaviour. There are typographic conventions that have developed on the various networks to get around the difficulties of expressing nuances in ASCII characters. One of the more universal is that UPPERCASE means SHOUTING (much to the chagrin of those with micros that only have uppercase). Some *surround phrases with asterisks* to indicate emphasis, while others s p a c e the characters out. People will mark or . Facial expressions often get spelled out <*grin*>. There are many ways to indicate the start of a flame, such as *FLAME ON!*. A shorter way to indicate the lack of serious intent is :-) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (hint : try looking at :-) sidewards) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here at the Open University, we are expending much effort in developing computer conferencing and electronic mail. Besides the conventions mentioned above people seem to emphasise /this way/ while the asterisks seem be used for *formal italics* (titles etc.). Two more facial expression's are common Sadness :-{ Suprise 8-0 We also seem to have a coherent use of Flame. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< FLAME ON >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Its primary use is to SHOUT opinions across in the general morass of conversation (or as one brilliant proponent from Finland recently argued, /mediocrity/). FLAMES are arguably one of the most stimulating environments in the E-conference theatre. They focus the MIND and cut the /drivel/. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< FLAME OFF >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Some of the OU's staff build up to /flames/ for days (hence mine is weak, its a two minute demonstration, not a heart-rending experience). /Flames/ seem to have got out of control on some communications networks and have been relegated to vehicles for /fun/. Our users seem to prefer them to express deep emotion via the ASCII character set. Andy Boddington Open University Milton Keynes England From: CSHUNTER@UOGUELPH Subject: Change of User Name Date: 28 September 1987, 16:06:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 325 (325) Hello; Effective immediately my USERNAME for Netnorth/Bitnet/Earn is changed from ENGHUNT@UOGUELPH to CSHUNTER@UOGUELPH Please make the necessary changes in your files and notes. Dr. C. Stuart Hunter, Department of English, University of Guelph, GUELPH, Ontario, Canada, N1G 2W1, 519-824-4120, ext. 3251. CSHUNTER@UOGUELPH From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASA_BODDINGTON@VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK Subject: Redistribution of HUMANISTHumanist etc. Date: 28 September 1987, 20:40:08 EDT28-SEP-1987 20:18:55 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 326 (326) The following question was sent to me by Andy Boddington of the Open University (UK): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I still continue to enjoy the contributions flowing in over the Ether. Here we run a conferencing system called CoSy (it comes from your corner of the world). I would quite like to post extracts from parts of HUMANIST into some of the CoSy conferences as they would be valid and useful contributions to the debate(s). Now what are the implications of this? Is HUMANIST discussion only appropriately discussed within HUMANIST or can extracts be displayed elsewhere. Naturally such contributions would be acknowledged. But would this offend your contributors, would it indeed amount to piracy? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the third or fourth such request, and my answer to Andy is the same as to the rest: that he is welcome to redistribute conversations on HUMANIST as he sees fit, but that anyone who wants to participate must join directly and thus be known to us all. In places where the cost of international electronic transmission is very high (e.g., New Zealand), direct membership by a number of people is not feasible, so we allow indirect membership provided that each of the active members sends a biography and that the person in charge of redistribution takes the responsibility for wicked flaming. I have two purposes for telling you all this: to get your reactions, if any, and to invite you to do the same if you chance to run a local bulletin board or redistribution list. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 19:08:59 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 327 (327) (and I apologize for a cretinous mailer thay has no subject field) I am surprised that no-one pointed out the derivation of FLAME ON and FLAME OFF; the Hackers Dictionary someone quoted is seriously misleading in claiming that FLAME ON means 'carry on flaming'. As any fule kno, the idea of a FLAME comes from Johnny Storm, part of the Fantastic Four (Marvel Comics), who could become a being of fire (and incidentally fly) at will. In the way that comic book heroes have, he appeared to find it necessary to say 'FLAME ON' to set the reaction going, and 'FLAME OFF' at the end when he sank to the ground to be a moody and spotty teenager again. Similarly, Judge Dredd says aloud 'Armour Piercing!' when he switches his Lawgiver gun to that setting to bring down a fleeing juve's car. A curious bit of popular Kultur, isnt it. Its typical of computer types (ie usenet gurus) to get their whole culture from junk comics, but then to forget its origin, and make up a pompous explanation. One is reminded of the claims people made that they knew what KERMIT stood for, when it was just the name of a certain frog. I found Andy Boddington's note about visual stress fascinating; I think it is a genuinely interesting problem, forced on us by the ASCII-Devil. If, of course, we agreed on an SGML-conformant markup for our messages, we could each have interpreters to display HUMANIST messages in a readable way. I think it would be sad if HUMANIST started to adopt the symbol conventions, dont you? :-) The use of asterisks and slashes, however, is /quite/ sensible. *UNLESS* you /overdo/ it. Brave New Worlds rule ok - lets NOT become like usenet.... sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A concert of noise? Date: 29 September 1987, 16:43:55 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 328 (328) Greg Waite, who kindly manages the redistribution for HUMANIST in New Zealand, has sent me the following: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A local reader of HUMANIST has asked me to pass on his observations about the subject matter of HUMANIST messages. He says: I note that there was some discussion about what sort of thing HUMANIST should be used for. May I, through you, suggest less chatter, and more solid discussion of Humanities-based topics, less about the computer, which is only a tool, and more about what we are using it for - teaching, research, etc. I ADORE computers and computing, but not for their own sake, only because of the way in which they can help me do other things. The people to whom I am trying to sell the HUMANIST idea do not adore computers, and the sort of exchanges which seem to be most frequent in HUMANIST do nothing to persuade them that they want to join in. I agree with these sentiments, but I concede that one of the factors which makes e-mail worthwhile is the rapidity with which information can be exchanged. This rapidity can only be maintained if there is no "editor" (the human kind), who is required to read and select material, thereby creating a delaying bottleneck. However, I believe users must exercise a certain editorial control over their contributions. While "chatter" is perhaps a relatively minor matter for many users in North America, merely clogging one's disk and taking a few seconds to skim and delete, in this part of the world mail-users bear all charges directly (and, unfortunately, we pay to receive as well as send trans-Pacific mail). It would be extremely helpful to us if chatter were kept to a minimum, and even highly important messages kept as concise as possible. This would surely benefit ALL users who store such mail and have limited disk space. Our point of view is a minority one, but perhaps you could put it out as a suggestion for consideration in any case. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [W.M. again] Here is a problem. Since most of us never think of cost when we use HUMANIST, we can allow ourselves the liberty of sporting with each other to relieve the rarely relieved seriousness of things. We can play with language (which Milton would argue is how prelapsarian language was used). We can risk saying something, at length, that might or might not prove valuable to someone else. Our New Zealand friends have a very real point, however. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Are other HUMANISTs affected by costs of transmission, even indirectly? Do those who are not have the impression of a significant amount of worthless chatter? I agree with Greg that self-control is the only kind worth having, but do you think that some of us need a bit more of it? Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto (416) 978-4238 From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Audio-Visual Stress Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 22:16 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 329 (329) Even a Toronto humanist can apparently see the words but miss the message. Of all people, allow a mere musician to demur. Isn't it time that hard-shell text-happy Humanities types faced up to the real danger they are courting by even a casual involvement with this new medium? It is not only costly (particularly if one chooses to live halfway round the world), but also hopelessly corrupt and corrupting, fooling one, by its very speed and immediacy, into thinking that one is no longer straightjacketed by mere print, but free to actually chatter away and draw pictures in the sand and even sing, not just chisel colums of cold, unadorned prose into tablets of lead or stone. Old Gutenberg's galaxy is larger and messier now, I fear, than some who identify humanistic study too closely with the uniformly printed page might feel comfortable to allow. I would urge all such, after making a quick detour to peruse the Book of Kells or the handiwork of the Benediktbeuern scriptorium (now those were TEXTS!!), to rush out and buy their first Macintosh. Life in the Ivory Tower (and notions of what constitutes worthwhile software for the humanities) may never be the same again. Hypertextually yours, S. Beckwith, York University From: "Prof. Choueka Yaacov" Subject: Address and e-mail Date: Wed, 30 Sep 87 11:48:57 +0200 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 330 (330) Please note my new address and e-mail: Yaacov Choueka Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100 choueka@bimacs.bitnet From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 331 (331) I happened to catch some of the conversation about 'chatter', 'off topic discussions', and costs of e-mail to subscribers in New Zealand. As Postmaster of a NetNorth site and ultimate controller of various 'goings on' within the LISTSERV groups at the University of Toronto, I feel that a little background to NetNorth, EARN, Bitnet, and LISTSERV may be of interest to the HUMANIST group. Basically the academic networks NetNorth, EARN, and Bitnet were formed to encourage a free exchange of academic and research information in a very fast and very cheap manner. One must admit that the speed of these networks surely beats the heck out of snail mail (Canada Post) and even, with respect, the efficient British Post Office (well, it's more efficient than anything on this side of the pond). How the costs of these networks are distributed varies with the network. Certainly, in Canada, one is not charged for incoming and outgoing e-mail. My British, European, and American colleagues can correct me, but I'd say that in general, this situation prevails across the networks. Thus, we in North America, the UK, and Europe are fortunate to have a reasonably cheap medium for academic exchange. It is indeed an unfortunate situation that those of you in New Zealand are being charged a greater amount to take advantage of HUMANIST on a different network. Maybe in the future, communication costs will drop in New Zealand. All I can say is that there are different ways of charging for e-mail and we are the lucky ones. I don't mean that last statement to sound mercenary, but the manner in which the system is used will in some way be driven by dollars, pounds, lira, etc. Can the costs be controlled by controlling chatter? Well, LISTSERVs are set up to encourage disscussion on a broad basis among many people. Willard is your editor and guiding light in this matter. As editor he has decided, after consultation with the initial subscribers, to let all participants submit material without editorial review. So, what this means is simply your group is self-regulating. How broad your discussions become and how much innovation occurs is up to you. I believe the expression, "free-wheeling" is appropriate here. If one or more people feel that submissions to the group are becoming a little fuzzy or irrelevant, all that has to be done is to send a gentle and Willard has told me that in his opinion, the group has found its intended purpose rather than strayed from it. In that, you are to be congratulated, for other LISTSERV groups have been known to turn into real zoos. So, if our friends down under are charged by the line, I guess I can encourage you to be succinct in your submissions. On the other hand, if they are charged by the number of 'pieces of mail' received, then such a suggestion is unnecessary. Maybe our New Zealand friends can tell us how they are charged and suggest some ways of making it cheaper for them. Is each individual charged for each piece of mail arriving in New Zealand? If you send or receive mail to one another in New Zealand, are you charged for each piece and is it cheaper than to send and receive mail from overseas? If there is a problem here, I don't think it is going to go away, because HUMANIST is growing all the time and therefore the number of potential submissions and hence traffic is also going to increase. HUMANIST started with a relatively small number of participants. At the moment, it well over 100 subscribers and growing weekly. I hope that this letter has been at least informative and that after seeing your latest discussions on FLAMES, I don't get roasted from the four corners of the earth, especially from the boiling mud of Rotorua. :-) I think that the HUMANIST discussion group is the greatest thing since sliced bread as it is exploring a new medium for your field. It certainly seems to have great potential. Enjoy it folks. If there is anything I can do to make it better or CHEAPER, please get in touch with me. Steve Younker, Postmaster - University of Toronto From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Fri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 332 (332) I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Costs Date: 2 October 1987, 12:02:25 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 333 (333) A network "postmaster" in New Zealand has kindly supplied some information about the cost of e-mail to and within his country. Some of his remarks bear on charges elsewhere in the world, so I pass the brief whole on to you. W.M. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 334 (334) A single copy of the Humanist mail comes into NZ at Waikato University over a Public Packet Switching network; thus we are charged on a volume basis, rather than letter basis. From there, a single copy is sent to each participating University, and redistributed internally. Thus the major cost is the importation of the material. The costs to individual recipients will go down if the number of recipients in NZ grows; otherwise costs can only go up (with a TELECOM monopoly) because a leased line connection is out of the question in the forseeable future. Internal charges for mail are 1/10th the international charges. The problem of mail costs is not entirely academic for our European colleagues I believe EARN is scheduled to move to Packet-Switching sometime, and then people will also be charged on a volume basis. This may be absorbed by the institutions involved (as the leased-line costs are now) or they may be passed on to individual departments. Whatever, one becomes more concious of costs when every word one sends adds to a University's bills, particularly if budgets become stretched. I know: we moved from a leased-line to a packet-switched connection to a sister institution - the real cost has dropped to a fraction of what it was, but I no longer shift megabytes around. The problem affects more than NZ; electronic mail is a wonderful way for remote and unwealthy universities to keep in touch and we should spread the gospel to (other) Third World countries, but they won't be connected by leased lines. Some of my collegues will be addressing this problem at the EDUCOM conference. Regards. AJB (Postmaster - Auckland University) From: Steve Younker Subject: Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 15:34:12 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 335 (335) A VERY brief test. From: Network Mailer CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@UK.AC.RL.IB Subject: mail delivery error Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 12:06:15 BSTFri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 336 (336) Batch SMTP transaction log follows: 220 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER X1.24 BSMTP service ready. 050 HELO UKACRL 250 UK.AC.RL.IB Hello UKACRL 050 MAIL FROM: 250 ... sender OK. 050 RCPT TO: 250 ... recipient OK. 050 DATA 354 Start mail input. End with . 554 Mail aborted. Maximum hop count exceeded. 050 QUIT 221 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done. Original message follows: I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Network Mailer CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@UK.AC.RL.IB Subject: mail delivery error Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 12:07:52 BSTFri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 337 (337) Batch SMTP transaction log follows: 220 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER X1.24 BSMTP service ready. 050 HELO UKACRL 250 UK.AC.RL.IB Hello UKACRL 050 MAIL FROM: 250 ... sender OK. 050 RCPT TO: 250 ... recipient OK. 050 DATA 354 Start mail input. End with . 554 Mail aborted. Maximum hop count exceeded. 050 QUIT 221 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done. Original message follows: I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Network Mailer CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@UK.AC.RL.IB Subject: mail delivery error Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 12:08:08 BSTFri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 338 (338) Batch SMTP transaction log follows: 220 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER X1.24 BSMTP service ready. 050 HELO UKACRL 250 UK.AC.RL.IB Hello UKACRL 050 MAIL FROM: 250 ... sender OK. 050 RCPT TO: 250 ... recipient OK. 050 DATA 354 Start mail input. End with . 554 Mail aborted. Maximum hop count exceeded. 050 QUIT 221 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done. Original message follows: I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Network Mailer CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@UK.AC.RL.IB Subject: mail delivery error Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 12:10:37 BSTFri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 339 (339) Batch SMTP transaction log follows: 220 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER X1.24 BSMTP service ready. 050 HELO UKACRL 250 UK.AC.RL.IB Hello UKACRL 050 MAIL FROM: 250 ... sender OK. 050 RCPT TO: 250 ... recipient OK. 050 DATA 354 Start mail input. End with . 554 Mail aborted. Maximum hop count exceeded. 050 QUIT 221 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done. Original message follows: I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Network Mailer CMI011%UK.AC.SOUTHAMPTON.IBM@UK.AC.RL.IB Subject: mail delivery error Date: Mon, 05 Oct 87 12:10:40 BSTFri, 2 Oct 87 14:17:54 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 340 (340) Batch SMTP transaction log follows: 220 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER X1.24 BSMTP service ready. 050 HELO UKACRL 250 UK.AC.RL.IB Hello UKACRL 050 MAIL FROM: 250 ... sender OK. 050 RCPT TO: 250 ... recipient OK. 050 DATA 354 Start mail input. End with . 554 Mail aborted. Maximum hop count exceeded. 050 QUIT 221 UK.AC.RL.IB Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done. Original message follows: I have written a short report on the courses I have taught for the Faculty of Arts here over the last year, with some general observations on humanities computing in Southampton. As this report is about 16 pages formatted, I am not sending it direct to HUMANIST, but will forward it to interested parties. Please tell me whether you want a preformatted ASCII text (rather gross) or LaTeX source (the decent version) for you to format yourself. If you have problems, I have sent copies of both to Willard and I hope he can redistribute as needed. The 'New Zealand' controversy; I am sorry to say this, but I think they are in a minority in having to spend real cash on Humanist, and that there is very little that can be done. To slightly correct Steve Younker, mail to Bitnet from JANET in Britain via the EARN gateway is currently funded by IBM, but in the near future the costs will have to be met from elsewhere, and it may revert back to each sender. FLAME ON Since Brian needs to spend a great deal of its money on prosecuting Peter Wright, keeping up a vast nuclear arsenal, and destroying the British education system (the Post Office went ages ago, Steve), I expect that soon you will hear no more than vague squeaks from Thatcherite Britain on HUMANIST..... FLAME OFF The content of HUMANIST: I'm sorry, I thought H. was *founded* for chatter! Isn't the purpose of H. to exchange ephemeral opinions, advice and questions about how computers relate to and are used in the Humanities? Maybe I am wrong, actually - Willard please correct me. If we are merely using the medium to discuss general issues of the humanities then I fail to see how we progress. ASCII communication. So how many books have you read recently that make no use of typographical tricks to make their point? OK, I except novels, but if I pick up (at random) The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny, and open to page 94, I see a) running head, page numbers b) italics for a book title c) smaller type for a quote d) mathematical setting without even trying. How do you convey that on a dull ASCII terminal? As to the person who suggested that buying a Mac might change ones life: I have had access to 2 Macs for 18 months, c. 5 seconds walk away. The most likely change to my life is death from suicide, due to frustration and anger at the mickey mouse software, the keyboard, the concept, the lot.... If thats the 20th century's answer to Gutenburg and the Book of Kells, god help us all said tiny tim. I for one would rather produce beautiful Gutenberg books with TeX. And so, dear readers (how many dollars so far to whoever owns those phone lines to New Zealand?), I urge you all to start considering sending your HUMANIST contributions in a compressed (there are good, widely available, compression programs - lets use them) form with structural markup. Sound the death knell to *reading* ASCII - leave it to computers. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Current flood of British junk mail Date: 6 October 1987, 11:22:55 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 341 (341) People on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to discover the cause of the problem that has resulted in the recent flood of junk mail from the U.K. We do not yet know if it was temporary and will not recur or is something more serious. If it continues we will first suspend HUMANIST for a day or two, then if the problem has not been found, we will restart HUMANIST without its U.K. members. They will be sent HUMANIST messages by a different means until the crisis is over. I very much regret that this latest spill is vexing you. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Wed, 7 Oct 87 18:26:22 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 342 (342) Apologies to those who suffered at the hands of my last HUMANIST contribution; I am unclear whether it was the fault of my machine or somewhere else. A quick question: who uses Icon? Roger Hare was suggesting a UK User Group, and it would be nice to know across the globe what the use is of Icon in the HUMANIST community. If people care to mail me or Roger, we would be glad to make some sense of the responses. (For those who dont have it, Icon is Griswold's structured successor to Snobol, available at media cost for Vax, Unix, MSDOS etc) sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The latest flood of junk mail & watchfulness Date: 7 October 1987, 18:04:50 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 343 (343) As far as we can tell, the latest outburst of junk e-mail was due to an isolated incident at the EARN/JANET gateway in the U.K. and should no longer trouble us. Response to this incident was slow because the local Postmaster and I thought that we alone were getting the junk. To improve our service we have each added a test account to HUMANIST that will allow us to see exactly what ListServ is sending everyone else. It is still possible that some node or gateway will cause trouble to you alone, however. So, if you're getting trashed, copy the trash and send it to your local expert and to us. I think it's important for us to be vigilant and vocal about the faults and virtues of the complex system that makes HUMANIST possible. My guess is that humanists are less tolerant of the quirks and get less pleasure from them than those who have gone before. We who value literacy can be a potent force for the improvement of e-mail. Our friends in New Zealand (I hope they are still our friends after this recent spill!) have alerted us to the unpleasant possibility of having to put a price on each word. As subsidies, such as IBM's in Canada, are removed, provision of free e-mail will have to be argued for, and fewer people will want to argue for an error-ridden, flaky system than for a truly reliable one. Thanks for your continued support and patience. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Conference report touching on HUMANIST Date: 8 October 1987, 13:54:16 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 344 (344) Dear Colleagues: This past weekend I had the opportunity to talk about HUMANIST and related matters with a small group at the annual conference of the Medieval Association of America, in Cleveland, Ohio. Four sessions on computing in the humanities were held, of which time allowed me to attend three. The next to the last session was given entirely by HUMANISTs: Chuck Henry (Columbia), May Katzen (Leicester), and John J. Hughes (Bits & Bytes Review). I won't attempt to summarize what they said, but from their talks, as from the talking of computing humanists everywhere, the need for the sharing of information became very clear. This need was addressed in the final session of the series. This session began with the questions of access to information and the forms it might take. Several participants (among whom I was one) stubbornly insisted that the quality and reliability of information and its means of organization are more important than mere quantity. The field is no longer so poor that we need gratefully snatch at whatever might be found; in fact, a researcher can easily be overwhelmed by the volume of raw information available in many areas of humanities computing. We are not yet able, however, to depend on accepted conventions of quality, aim, and focus. We gave some attention to standards for software. Some participants noted that these do not need to be spelled out, rather they should be analogous to the implicit standards of traditional academic disciplines. Several people complained of the general lack of agreement about what constitutes good software, with the concomitant undependability of software reviews. These often do little more than illuminate the ignorance of the reviewer. Trust, one participant pointed out, is essential; otherwise the reinvention of wheels is a lamentable necessity. The MLA's project to provide peer-review of software, which Randy Jones announced recently here, was mentioned as one positive sign. The lack of academic recognition for work in our field (which contributes to the poor quality of reviews) naturally reared its blatant ugliness, but one participant reported that at his institution a group of senior professors had been able, after tireless efforts, to get such work to count towards hiring, tenure, and promotion. There was general agreement that such recognition depends not only on the unbending insistence of senior faculty but also on the solidity of the work and the dependability of its means of access. May Katzen pointed to the wider problem of access on various levels. Experts can forget that computing or potentially computing humanists require information according to their experience and interests. Introductory guidebooks, textbooks, and courses are thus as necessary as comprehensive bibliographies. Again, the worth of information is not necessarily proportional to its volume but depends on its structure and its reliability. Existing and forthcoming channels of communication were discussed: May Katzen's HUMBUL electronic bulletin board and its parallel "Humanities Communication Newsletter" in the U.K.; John Hughes' "Bits and Bytes Review" and forthcoming book, "Bits, Bytes, & Biblical Studies: A Resource Guide for the Use of Computers in Biblical and Classical Studies" (forthcoming November 20, 1987, by Zondervan Publishing House); the "Humanities Computing Yearbook" that Ian Lancashire and I are involved with; our own HUMANIST; and several books, journals, newsletters, and other electronic services. May Katzen later noted that, "we need different kinds of vehicles for conveying different kinds of information about computing in the humanities, depending on the information itself and the needs and interests of users and readers." I found myself noticing that what makes HUMANIST different from the others (and I think especially valuable) is that its conversational style encourages not so much the exchange of information but of ideas and substantive issues. As editor of HUMANIST I usually try to stimulate or provoke discussions rather than contribute to them, but here I cannot resist offering my view that the discussion of ideas and issues is what we do best of all. This is not to say that HUMANIST should not be used for distributing listings, texts, reviews, and so forth, just that our prime possibility for contribution to our emerging discipline seems to me more philosophical than informational. Unless, that is, "information" is interpreted etymologically, to mean "that which bestows form." Form is exactly what we need (architecture, not just more bricks), and this, I think, was the primary message of the sessions I attended in Cleveland. Many thanks are due to David Richardson, managing editor of the Spenser Encyclopedia and organizer of the sessions on computing, for his inexhaustible generosity, kindness, and enthusiasm for real computing in the real humanities. Yours, W.M. [This message has 95 lines.] _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Republication of HUMANIST Date: 8 October 1987, 14:11:41 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 345 (345) From time to time contributions to HUMANIST may be republished electronically elsewhere, for example, on May Katzen's HUMBUL bulletin board. If you do not want something of yours republished in this way, please attach a brief statement to that effect to your contribution. W.M. From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Fri, 9 Oct 87 14:43:11 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 346 (346) A small plea: I am supervising a 3rd year Computer Science student's project, and we have decided he is to write a 'browsing aid' for German, a program to take a reader through a text in a language he/she more or less knows and gives help on vocabulary and grammar when requested. So a) I know other people have done/are doing similar projects. Any suggestions as to what to avoid or what features to aim for? b) we really need a machine-readable German-English dictionary; has anyone got such a beast, however skimpy, that we could have or buy? Sorry if this seems really naive - any thoughts welcome. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Status of Humanities Computing Date: Friday, 9 October 1987 0931-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 347 (347) I appreciate Willard's good report on the Cleveland discussions, and will use its appearance as an opportunity to (again) try to air some strategies for addressing some of the issues raised. My biggest disappointment with HUMANIST (balanced by many positive aspects) is the failure of all but a few HUMANISTS to become involved in substantive discussions of how to help make computing an accepted part of the arsenal of tools for humanist scholarship, teaching and research. Specifically, I have not received a single comment from any HUMANIST member (pro or con) on the suggestion that we take cooperative steps to produce an appropriate standard information column to offer to professional societies for their newsletters/journals, similar to what I already do for Religious Studies News. It seems to me that until and unless we raise the consciousness of our relatively uninitiated colleagues to the values, availability, etc. of computer related developments, we will make little headway on many of the issues touched on by Willard's report. The HUMANIST membership presumably represents various professional societies and connections. What do you think about this idea? Would you be willing to be involved, at least as an advocate to your own societies? Or am I wrong that there is a need for such "consciousness raising"? I did get a limited amount of response to an earlier question about cooperation (consortium model) among the various "centers." The context of my query was the rejection by NEH of a proposal that, among other things, argued for the creation of a position of "coordinator" for pursuing such a consortium arrangement. Among the comments from reviewers of the proposal was the question whether the existing "centers" really wanted such cooperation? I had hoped to learn from the HUMANIST participants whether they thought that a move to cooperative efforts (in coordinating information, producing generally useful software and encoding data, quality control, etc.) was a useful idea or not. There is no point in spending hours to write grant proposals if those who would supposedly profit from the project being proposed are not interested in it! Conferences are fine to discuss what needs to be done, but at some point, shouldn't we face up to the practical questions of who will do what and how to fund it? Your ideas are *eagerly* sought, and should be of interest to most other HUMANISTS, I would think. Bob Kraft From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster Subject: Browing aids Date: 9 October 1987 10:54:10 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 348 (348) Just a quick note on some existing browsing aids I know about, in answer to Sebastian Rahtz's inquiry. Jim Noblett at Cornell was working, last I heard, on a system for foreign-language (specifically French, but I think the system was to be extensible) composition work. The basic concept was that of an editor or word processor with the tools to make second-language composition easier, specifically online dictionary lookups in either direction, and the ability to examine inflectional paradigms on demand (to find out just what the second-person plural future perfect subjunctive form IS). There may have been standard compositional aids, too (outlining, screen-blanking for brain- storming sessions, and so on), but I don't believe there were when I saw the program in 1986. A system for browing rather than composition would require a different, but overlapping, set of features. Perhaps someone more with more recent knowledge can report on the program. Commercially, there is a system called Mercury, for creating and using online lexica. This is a memory-resident program for IBM PCs and compatibles; the intended users, I believe, are primarily working translators (who would construct specialized lexica for technical fields, to aid their work in technical translation) and language teachers and learners (who would use the online dictionary for browsing texts in the target language, or for composition). I have not used Mercury myself, but the grapevine I've heard has been positive. One big advantage: it's memory resident and so can be consulted from whatever editor the user fancies -- the user is not forced into a specific kind of editor to use the lexicon. Since you asked for desiderata, I'll suggest five: (1) The user should be able to browse through the dictionary headwords (eg on a screen with one headword per line, and the beginning of the dictionary article on the rest of the line). (2) The user should not have to type the word to be looked up, if it's already on the screen: positioning the cursor over the word in question should be enough. (3) Ideally, the user should be able to find inflected forms as well as dictionary-headword forms -- at least for irregular inflections. (4) (For this the student should get serious extra credit!) I always want to look up synonyms and near-synonyms of words I am learning -- so it would be nice to be able to get a display of words with similar meanings. A hidden lookup based on Roget's thesaurus numbers might be one approach to this task, but maybe your student can come up with something better. (5) In reading the text, the user should have the same freedom of movement found in any normal text editor: forward and backward by screen or line. This seems obvious to me but there are serious programs for humanists which give you a forward-only browse function, and eventually they make me want to put my fist through the screen. Finally, I want to argue that a truly serious program of this kind (not necessarily a student project, or a program one writes for oneself and one's friends, but certainly a program written for wide serious distribution, whether commercial or not) would do very well to handle texts in formats other than plan vanilla ASCII. One can always export a Wordstar or Word Perfect file to ASCII, and ditto for most other programs -- but it's a boring, burdensome chore and it would be a real boon to have text-analysis tools be able to handle one's word processor files without further ado. Ideally, the analysis program would recognize bolding and underscoring and centering, and display accordingly -- failing that, I'd settle for a program that just stripped out the control codes and displayed legible text. Would it be so impossible to handle files in the five or six most common word processors? From my experiences deciphering Word perfect files, I'd say not impossible at all. Do other people agree, or would this be asking too much of our software-making friends? (And which editors are the most commonly used and should be supported?) (This message has 81 lines, including the address header.) From: "Dr. Joel Goldfield" Subject: Date: Fri, 9 Oct 87 10:52:19 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 349 (349) Dear Colleagues, I thank Willard for his encouraging advocacy of our concerns and heartily agree with his observation about the need for senior colleagues to press for inclusion of our activities in job descriptions. Observing my few senior colleagues has shown me that when they begin to work with word processors and gleefully join me in pointing out the major pedago- gical failings of much computer-assisted language instruction, they become much more involved in computing in the humanities, and always on an optimistic bent. This favorable disposition sometimes requires a bit of time, up to a year, but it inevitably occurs here, at least, if the faculty member starts to do something productive with computers. --Joel D. Goldfield Plymouth State College (NH, USA) From: IDE@VASSAR Subject: willard's message Date: Mon, 12-OCT-1987 11:43 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 350 (350) In response to Willard McCarty's note outlining discussions about the nedd for information exchange in t he filed of humanities computing, I would like to point out two current efforts by ACH to accomplish this: first, ACH has just received a grant from NEH to develop guidelines for the encoding of texts intended for research in literature and linguistics. Such guidelines will provide consistency in machine-readabel texts and enable (as well as hopefully encourage) the development of software for manipulation and analysis of such texts that does not require specialized forms of input. Second, ACH is at present applying to NEH to augment a data base of information on computers and the humanities courses and establish an on-line bibliogrphy for computers and the humanities. Nancy M. Ide ide@vassar From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: Consolidated Computer Column for humanists Date: 12 October 1987 11:24:21 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 351 (351) Reflections on Bob Kraft's idea of a consolidated column on computer uses in research, to be distributed to / for / by a variety of scholarly organizations. At first sight, I confess this idea did not fill me with enthusiasm. A general column might easily be reduced to common denominator material (look at what happened to PMLA when they decided to print only articles of 'general interest') and end up containing no information of real interest to anyone, at least not regularly. It would be work, at least for the columnist. My zeal for proselytizing has fallen off sharply of late. And does a column of this sort really belong in a journal? Reconsidering it, however, the idea looks not bad at all. If I envision it as appearing not necessarily in the journal, but rather in the newsletter, of my various professional organizations, the idea of a regular column seems less incongruous. And if I envision it as discussing character set standards, the American Association of Publishers electronic manuscript markup tags, text encoding issues, text analysis software, special-purpose systems like the Ibycus, and giving the occasional overview of word-processing issues and problems of displaying and printing special characters on a level appropriate for reasonably competent non-beginners -- in short, if I envision its contents as similar to those of Bob Kraft's column (the ones I've seen), it becomes positively attractive. I for one can well do without more material aimed at novices, but a colunn for people who have outgrown novice material would fill a need. As the list above suggests, I wouldn't urge much concentration on commercial software, though they needn't be banned entirely. Instead, discussions of (a) widespread problems and the various approaches to their solution, (b) standards and standardization efforts, and (c) examples of concrete work (e.g. a report on how the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae has organized its database, -- without becoming too involved in details of their database management system: staying on the level of data analysis and organization) that other people can learn from. (When it left my hands, this note contained 65 lines. I am not responsible if some mailer adds error messages at the top.) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More biographies Date: 12 October 1987, 14:59:34 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 352 (352) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Third Supplement Following are 19 more entries to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to MCCARTY at UTOREPAS.BITNET. W.M. 11 October 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 353 (353) *Bratley, Paul Departement d'informatique et de r.o., Universite de Montreal, C.P. 6128, Succursale A, MONTREAL, Canada H3C 3J7, (514) 343 - 7478 I have been involved in computing in the humanities since the early 1960s, when I worked at Edinburgh University on automated mapping of Middle English dialects. Since then I have been involved in projects for syntax recognition by computer and a number of lexicographical applications. With Serge Lusignan I ran for seven years at the University of Montreal a laboratory which helped users with all aspects of computing in the humanities. As a professor of computer science, it is perhaps not surprising that my interests lie at the technical end of the spectrum. I designed, with a variety of graduate students, such programs as Jeudemo (for producing concordances), Compo (for computer typesetting), and Fatras (for fast on-line retrieval of words and phrases), all of which were or are still used inter- nationally in a variety of universities. My main current research interest involves the design of a program for on-line searching of manuscript catalogues. The idea is to be able to retrieve incipits despite unstable spelling and such-like other variants in medieval texts. The project, involving partners in Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia is intended to work at least for Latin, Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and possibly for others as well. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 354 (354) *Carpenter, David I am an assistant professor of theology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia with training primarily in the history of religions. I work on Indian traditions (Hinduism and Buddhism) as well as some work on Western Medieval material. I have recently been engaged in putting a Sanskrit test into machine-readable form and would like to see what else has been done. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 355 (355) *Dixon, Gordon Bitnet Editor-in-Chief, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Institute of Advanced Studies, Manchester Polytechnic, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6BH U.K. In particular, my interest lies in the publication of good quality papers in the areas of: Computers applied to literature and language. Computing techniques. Reports on research projects. Hardware and software. CAL and CALL. Word Processing for Humanities. Teaching of computer techniques to language and literature students. Survey papers and reviews. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 356 (356) *Gilliland, Marshall Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 0W0 (306) 966-5501 campus, (306) 652-5970 home I'm a professor of English whose literary specialty is American literature, and I also teach expository prose, first-year classes, and utopian literature in English. Thus far, I'm the lone member of my department to use a mainframe computer and to teach writing using a computer. Most immediately, I'm the faculty member responsible for getting a large computer lab for humanities and social science students in the college, and one of the few faculty promoting using computers. I maintain the list ENGLISH on CANADA01. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 357 (357) *Hamesse, Jacqueline Universite Catholique de Louvain, Chemin d'Aristote, 1, B-1348 LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE (Belgium) Je suis membre du Comite d'ALLC et Co-ordinator de l'organisation des Conferences annuelles de cette association. D'autre part, je suis Professeur a l'Universite Catholique de Louvain et Presidente de l'Institut d'Etudes Medievales. Je travaille depuis vingt ans dans le domaine du traitement des textes philosophiques du moyen age a l'aide de l'ordinateur. Pour le moment, j'etudie surtout les possibilites offertes par l'ordinateur pour la collation et le classement des manuscrits medievaux. Je viens de lancer avec Paul Bratley de l'Universite de Montreal un projet international de Constitution d'une base de donnees pour les incipits de manuscrits medievaux (latins, grecs, hebreux et arabes). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 358 (358) *Hubbard, Jamie I teach in the area of Asian Religions at Smith College, focusing on East Asian Buddhism. I am also active in attempting (??!!) to archive Chinese materials on CD-ROM and other sundry projects (IndraNet, bulletin board/ conferencing for Buddhist Studies, has been around for app. 2 yrs). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 359 (359) *Hughes, John J. (for other electronic addresses, see bottom of front page of last issue of the "Bits & Bites Review") 623 Iowa Ave., Whitefish, MT 59937, (406) 862-7280 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 360 (360) Dept of History, University of York, Heslington, YORK YO1 5DD, U.K. My interests are in the field of early medieval history, specifically Frankish history, and with a special interest in Merovingian cemeteries. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 361 (361) *Jones, Randall L. Humanities Research Center, 3060 JKHB, Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602, (Tel.) 8013783513 I am a Professor of German and the Director of the Humanities Research Center at Brigham Young University. I have been involved with using the computer in language research and instruction since my graduate student days at Princeton, 1964-68. My activities have included the development of language CAI, diagnostic testing with the computer, interactive video (I worked on the German VELVET program), computer assisted analysis of modern German and English and the development and use of electronic language corpora. I have worked closely with the developers of WordCruncher (aka BYU Concordance) to make certain that the needs of humanists are properly met (e.g. foreign character sets, substring searches, etc.). In 1985 I organized (with the good assistance of my colleagues in the HRC) the 7th International Conference on Computers and the Humanities, which was held at BYU. I am a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Chairman of the Educational Software Evaluation Committee of the Modern Language Association, a member of the Committee on Information and Communication Technology of the Linguistic Society of America, and a member of the Editorial Board of "SYSTEM". I have written articles and given lectures on many aspects of the computer and language research and instruction. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 362 (362) *Lane, Simon Computing Service, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, England. I am currently employed as a Programmer in the Computing Service at Southampton University, England, and have special responsibility for liaison with the Humanities departments within the University, and support of their computing needs. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 363 (363) *Lessard, Greg I am a linguist (Ph.D. 1983, Laval, in differential linguistics, for a study of formal mechanisms of antonymy in English and French). I have been teaching in the Department of French Studies at Queen's since 1978 and have been involved in humanities computing for several years now, in a variety of areas: 1) computer-aided analysis of literary texts. In 1986 Agnes Whitfield and I gave a paper at the annual meeting of the "Association canadienne- francaise pour l'avancement des sciences" where we used a computer analysis to compare two novels by Michel Tremblay and Victor-Levy Beaulieu, respectively. Agnes is also in French Studies. 2) production of computer-readable texts. For the past year or so, I have participated in a group project in the Department of French Studies at Queen's which involves the entry into the mainframe of computer-readable texts by means of a Kurzweil data entry machine. 3) concordance production. J.-J. Hamm (of Queen's) and I are working on a concordance of the novel "Armance" by Stendhal. 4) linguistic analysis. I make heavy use of the computer in my work analysing errors in student texts produced in French. 5) annotation. Diego Bastianutti (of Queen's) and I are working in the area of annotation as a teaching tool in the humanities. We gave a paper at this year's Learned Societies where we outlined our research and presented a prototype of an annotation facility based on the word processing program "PC-Write". 6) computer-aided instruction. With a group of colleagues in the languages and in computer science at Queen's, I am working on an intelligent computer-aided instruction system for French, other Romance languages, and eventually a variety of other languages as well. We are in the second year of this multi-year project, funded in part by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities of Ontario. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 364 (364) *Logan, George M. Professor and Head, Department of English, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6; 613-545-2154 My area of literary specialization is the English Renaissance. For my research interests in computer applications to literary studies, see the biography of my colleague David Barnard. For 1986-87, I have been chairman of the Steering Group for Humanities Computing of five Ontario universities: McMaster, Queen's, Toronto, Waterloo, and Western Ontario. I am also a member of the steering group of the Ontario Consortium for Computing and the Humanities. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 365 (365) *Ravin, Yael I have an M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language from Columbia University and a Ph.D in Linguistics from the City University of New York. My Ph.D thesis is about the semantics of event verbs. I am a member of the Natural Language Processing Group at the Watson Research Center of IBM. My work consists of writing rules in a computer language called PLNLP for the detection of stylistic weaknesses in written documents. I am now beginning research in semantics. This research consists of developing PLNLP rules to investigate the semantic content of word definitions in an online dictionary, in order to resolve syntactic ambiguity. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 366 (366) *Reimer, Stephen I am an assistant professor of English, using computers extensively both in research and in teaching. My introduction to computer use in the humanities came in the late 70s when I was beginning my dissertation and was faced with an authorship question in a set of medieval texts--I thought that the problem might be resolvable through quantitative stylistics with the help of the computer. Through John Hurd at the Univ. of Toronto, I learned the rudiments of programming in SNOBOL and learned much about concordancing algorithms; on this basis, I wrote a rather large and sloppy program to "read" any natural language text and to generate a substantial number of statistics. Producing the dissertation itself involved me with micro-computers and laser printers. And when I began teaching after graduation, I was involved in an experiment using Writers' Workbench as an aid in teaching composition. I have, this fall, moved from the U of T to the University of Alberta. Here I have been asked to act as something of a consultant for other English professors who are starting to make use of computers, and I have been assigned to a team with a mandate to establish a small computing centre to be shared by four humanities departments (English, Religious Studies, Philosophy and Classics). Finally, I am embarking on a long term project which is again concerned with authorship disputes: over the coming years I expect to consume huge numbers of cycles in an effort to sort out the tangled mess of the canon of John Lydgate. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 367 (367) *Salotti, Paul Oxford University Computing Service, 13, Banbury Road, OXFORD OX2 6NN U.K. Tel. 0865-273249 I work in the Oxford University Computing Service and provide support and consultancy for the application and use of databases (Ingres, IDMS, dBase etc) in academic research. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 368 (368) *Smith, Tony I have recently started work as research assistant to Gordon Neal in the Department of Greek at Manchester University. Our project has a number of aims. Ultimately we hope to program a computer to perform as far as possible the automatic syntactic parsing of Classical Greek. Texts with syntactic tagging (which in the early stages can be performed manually) can then be used for pedagogic purposes, by allowing a student on a computer to ask for help with the morphology and syntax of selected words and sentences. The tagged texts would also be very useful for research purposes, allowing various kinds of statistical analysis to be carried out. The texts will be drawn from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database on CD-ROM, which will be accessed by a network of IBM-compatibles. The system will also offer facilities for searching through the Greek texts similar to those found on the Ibycus Scholarly Computer. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 369 (369) *Tov, Emmanuel Prof. in the Dept of Bible, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Tel. (02)883514 (o), 815714 (h). Together with R.A. Kraft of the U. of Penn. I am the director of the CATSS Project - computer assisted tools for Septuagint studies (for a description of the work, see CATSS volumes 1 and 2). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 370 (370) *Wolffe, John Temporary Lecturer in History, University of York, England. AT the moment my use of computers in my own research is confined largely to humble word-processing, but I have plans during the next academic year to develop some computer-based analysis of the 1851 England and Wales Census of Religious Worship. I am also very interested in wider questions about the use of computers in the humanities, especially as these relate to the development of coherent defense of the humanities in general and of history in particular in the face of the current political and social climate in the UK. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 371 (371) *Wyman, John C. Library Systems Office, Bird Library, Room B106F, Syracuse Univ. Syracuse, New York 13244-1260 USA, (315) 423-4300/2573 I am the Systems Officer for the Syracuse University Library, called Bird Library, and am in charge of all of our computer and system support for the library. This includes our on-line catalog (SULIRS); access to OCLC for shared bibliographic cataloging information; and our increasing use of microcomputers for staff support. Also I'm involved in our on-line access to remote data bases, such as Dialog or BRS, for our users and staff. Finally we have a growing effort of acquiring and providing access to collections of research data for people in the social sciences, called the Research Data System of the Libraries. My interests revolve around providing access to, and usage of computers for, non-computer type people. Even, and especially, at the expense of extra programming and systems effort. Too many computer systems today are hard for e for the casual user to use. My background is Electrical Engineering, Numerical Analysis, Computer User Service, Library User Service, with many systems designed and programmed by me or my staff. The human interface is the most important aspect of this work. From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Computer Column for Humanist Newsletters Date: Tuesday, 13 October 1987 0941-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 372 (372) I very much appreciate Michael Sperberg-McQueen's thoughtful response to the "syndicated column" suggestion. He asks for some further information, and notes that we are nearing the season for professional society meetings such as MLA (also AAR/SBL/ASOR, APA, and doubtless others). His response also points to the need to ask a supplementary question: how many professional society publications known to HUMANISTS already attempt to deal with computer-related matters in a systematic manner? (And how many don't?) How great is the need? Michael's listing of representative issues for such a column is largely similar to what I do in my own OFFLINE column, although I also try to give the "novice" leads on where to get good information for becoming a "competent non-beginner" -- that is, I really try not to scare "novices" away, but to lead them further into the subject by defining new computer jargon (e.g. most recently "hypertext" -- "authoring systems" in a future issue), alerting them to new software releases of special interest (e.g. micro-OCP), informing them of data availability (e.g. CCAT diskettes and CD-ROM, TLG, Oxford Archive), etc. I do not find the writing of the column overly onerous since I note in my own computer file new information and ideas as they come to my attention, and simply organize those materials when the next deadline rolls around. To broaden the coverage in a "syndicated" form would doubtless involve more work, but if there was a responsible board of editorial contributors, it MIGHT not be overly demanding. I am willing to be involved, but am not begging to be editor, if we decide to try the experiment. I am convinced of the value of this approach, based on 15 issues of OFFLINE and the responses that column has produced, and will continue the OFFLINE column if nothing supercedes it. Bob From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Line count Date: 13 October 1987, 19:35:13 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 373 (373) John Law of Newcastle (U.K.), who receives HUMANIST through a redistribution list, suggests that our desultory practice of putting a line count at the end of messages is a good idea -- but upside down. He'd like to see such a count at the beginning, as he explains in the following. If it's at all possible, would you mind indicating in your subject line the approximate number of lines in the message that follows? Thanks very much. W.M. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The reason I'd like the count at the beginning is a simple one (which we've used here for several years): if the message is going to be a long one I want to interrupt it right away and then read it later at my leisure (laughable term, in this business). The HUMANIST messages come in with all my other messages, from user queries to meeting announcements etc. I archive all the HUMANIST material for later study, but I like (as well) to read them as they appear on the screen: if they are not longer than, say, 50 lines. Yours, John Law (Documentation Officer, Computing Services, Secretary to Arts Advisory Group, and (once) an Arts Graduate.) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: This time it's Swedish junk mail.... Date: 13 October 1987, 23:31:03 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 374 (374) The recent (even, alas, ongoing) flood of junk mail was due to a Swedish HUMANIST's userid suddenly becoming illegal -- for whatever reason. I have removed the innocently offending person from the list, but it appears that the junk keeps coming. It will stop shortly. Hang on, my stalwart colleagues! Yours, W.M. From: "Dana E. Cartwright 3rd" Subject: Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1987 08:19:55 LCL X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 375 (375) I dislike doing things by hand which a computer can do as well, more easily, and often more accurately. The counting of lines in a message seems to fall into this category of activity. On all IBM computers running the VM/CMS operating system, incoming mail is summarized by sender, time, date, and number of lines. One reads it in whatever order strikes one's fancy. The issue of the order in which I read my mail is a matter which I should sort out on my end. I, for example, file my electronic mail into an extensive series of notebooks, by subject. I could ask all of you to include one or more subject keywords on each of your messages, to make my filing easier or more accurate. But, I think the assigning of keywords is something which *I* should do. I put line counts in the same category. From: CHURCHDM@VUCTRVAX Subject: Optical Scanning of Texts -- Hard- and software Date: Thu, 15 Oct 87 00:03 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 376 (376) We at Vanderbilt are about to submit a grant proposal for a major project involving scanning to put in machine-readable form a large body of texts almost all of which are in French. I have talked with VAR dealers about recent products from both Kurzweil and Palantir, and in both cases the dealers have told me that the machines (and the accompanying software) cannot handle the accented letters in French. From the entries I have seen in the lists of machine-readable text in HUMANIST, I find it hard to believe that somebody out there hasn't already solved this problem. Would you please send messages to me personally telling me what hardware and software solutions you have found to the problem of scanning texts with accented letters. I'll summarize the answers in a message to HUMANIST. Dan Church Vanderbilt University (CHURCHDM@VUCTRVAX) (This message contains 14 lines, including this one.) From: Mark Olsen Subject: TEXTS? Date: Thu, 15 Oct 87 13:11:10 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 377 (377) Before scanning in the following titles, I would like to know if they have been put on tape already: John Woolman (1720-1772) The Journal of .... Essays of ... Joyce, Finnegans Wake I am a little surprised that the latter does not exist in computer readable format. Woolman is an obscure Quaker writer, or I should say obscure to me. Any reference to an electronic copy would be greatly appreciated. From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Mon, 19 Oct 87 19:29:33 BST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 378 (378) A colleague (as yet un-HUMANISTized) asks me about the DEREDEC system from Quebec. I know that a few places in Canada have it, and use it, but I have not properly taken on board their feelings about it (it is, for those who have not come across it, a large French grammer analysis system). I wonder if anyone would care to comment, either to me direct or (perhaps better) to Sean O'Cathasaigh himself (despite appearances, he is in the Department of French here!)= FRI001@uk.ac.soton.ibm, about - the state and/or usefulness of DEREDEC and its subsystems for serious research - the likely learning curve for the non-Lisp hacker - the usefulness of the package for undergraduate teaching. A general question arises, which concerns me for a number of reasons, about whether in general these large sophisticated systems can ever have an impact on undergraduate teaching as we know it. Is there place in a British 3 year degree for a *serious* look at grammar? I suppose it goes back to that issue about whether "IT" should/could affect the whole undergraduate career - if we use the computer's power to seriously look at grammar a) we need a better background in school, and b) we will have to drop something - what? it may interest HUMANISTs to know that this University offers a degree in Modern Languages with Computing. Students do a conventional language course, but largely leaving out the literature, do extra linguistics and philosophy, and do half a Computer Science degree. Are they better or worse off? sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: GUEST4@YUSOL Subject: Are Musicians Humanists Too? (testing the waters) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 87 23:54 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 379 (379) From the Fall 1987 issue of IEEE Expert, p. 86: From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 380 (380) Musical scoring on PCs ---------------------- After 16 years of work, according to the Stanford University News Service, Leland Smith has adapted his computer music printing system (called Score) for use with any IBM or compatible PC. Passport Designs Inc. (Half Moon Bay, CA) will distribute the program. A Stanford faculty member since 1958, Smith has also worked with computer-generated sound and has long-range visions of computer use in the music industry. "I want to be able to do almost anything you can think of with Score," he says. Users can add lyrics and graphics to their music easily with the system. "Music is a code system made up of symbols with conventional meanings," Smith says. His system contains a library of 200 musical symbols plus graphics (Mrs. Smith, an art instructor at Foothill College, has included an image library for illustrating children's music). Score can stretch symbols and notes, rotate them, move them to different lines, and transpose them with ease. Composers can zoom in for a closer focus on any section of a musical score. While Smith does not expect computer sound to replace musical instruments, he hopes to see computers involved in the electronic distribution of music, allowing quick transfer of musical scores worldwide. At present, he has to wait six months to receive music ordered from Vienna through an American distributor. In 10 years or so, he foresees every music library equipped with terminals at which students can view music on a screen, deposit coins, and recieve printed copies. The cost of computer music printing has declined since the days of its use on $50,000 computers. Desktop music publishing is now the province of users equipped with PCs, printers, and Score. The program will sell for $495. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Interesting software Date: 20 October 1987, 20:09:50 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 381 (381) So far V E R Y F E W suggestions have reached me about interesting software as a result of the announcement on HUMANIST of the Humanities Computing Yearbook (Oxford U.P., vol. 1 forthcoming Summer 1988). By means of local sources, other grapevines, and esp. my knowledgeable co-editor, I've managed to identify nearly 100 items, a sufficient number, but I wouldn't want to overlook any worthy packages. So, if you know of software you consider worthwhile, please send a note to YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS.BITNET giving as much of the relevant information as you have. Include an electronic address if the author or vendor has one. However obvious the excellence of the software may be to you, don't assume that I've already listed it. Our field is still too disorganized for anyone to be able to claim comprehensive and systematic knowledge of its goings on, even if he or she works at it without sleep. I sleep. Thanks very much, in advance, for your help. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: KRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: Source Code for LIST or BROWSE Date: Thursday, 22 October 1987 0929-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 382 (382) I know of two very useful public domain programs for accessing text files on the IBM PC, LIST (which I use regularly) and BROWSE (which others have recommended), and would like to have the source code so that some features could be added. Does anyone know where the source code for LIST and/or BROWSE is available? Bob Kraft, CCAT From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The first summary and its forthcoming sequel Date: 22 October 1987, 20:49:12 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 383 (383) Those of you who are members of the ACH have likely seen the first summary of activities on HUMANIST (for the period June-July 1987) in print in the Newsletter. For those of you who aren't, the text of the article is exactly the same as the summary file sent to all of you. Some time ago I noticed that my file of contributions to HUMANIST was growing so rapidly that another bimonthly summary was inevitable. That summary is close to completion, so I'd appreciate any contributions to it, from those of you who have held interesting private discussions or received direct replies to questions and think these replies worth publishing. I may finish the summary by the end of this weekend, but perhaps not. If you have anything and anticipate sending it, please let me know directly right away. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: Philippa MW Matheson 416 925-9931 Subject: Copyright: translations on the net Date: 23 October 1987, 01:05:02 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 384 (384) I've been following some of the debate on the copyright status of contibutions to HUMANIST, and gather that an informal practice obtains: if you *say* you don't want something re- published, then it doesn't go further than the original publication (i.e., its appearance in HUMANIST in the first place). Also a good deal has been said about whether contibutions to computer journals count as publications from the point of view of academic credit and/or whether hard copy publishers are willing to allow "their" books to appear on computer net. But the invitations to contribute to text archives that I've seen do not seem to say "Of course if you send us something you must be sure that you/we have the right to publish it." If I were to type out the published poems of a contemporary poet, still living, and contribute them to such an archive, and if the archive were then to send them on request to, let's say, a school teacher who printed them out in multiple copies for her/his class, surely someone has infringed copyright somewhere? Was it alright until it got into hardcopy? My reason for asking about this is that I have for some years been doing informal translations of archaeological articles (mostly to do with amphoras) from Russian books and journals for circulation among a very limited body of "amphoristes." Since they are usually things I, or members of the Amphora Project I work with in Greece, want to read, I don't attempt to exact a fee. But it seems to me the sort of thing which should be available to any interested scholar, and a Russian colleague is presently helping me a) to make the translations I've done more accurate, b) to do more, and c) to compile a bibliography of Soviet studies on "ceramic epigraphy" and amphora studies in general (which, of course, gets us into the odd excavation report, for dates and stratigraphy, and even into clay analysis studies of other objects, like roof-tiles; and we aren't above obliging with a curse tablet article, when requested). When enough material is available, I would like to offer the bibliography (which would list available "private" translations, on line or off) to other Humanists, and send on-line translations to anyone who asks. If I wanted to publish a volume of translations, I or the publishing firm would, I think, get permission from the original publishers: is electronic publication different? Or is it simply the lack of formal legislation covering the computer journals which makes me feel, as I confess I do, that I can simply go ahead (provided anyone wants the material, of course...). Perhaps there are parallels for this: if so, I'd be glad to hear about them, and any comments you may have on the legality of such a service (and/or its utility...). --------------------- __ __ [||] (416) amphoras Philippa MW Matheson [||] < > 925-9931 (work) at 43 McKenzie Avenue < > \/ 921-1774 (home) utorepas Toronto, Ont M4W 1K1 \/ From: Undetermined origin c/o Postmaster Subject: Copyright Date: 23 October 1987 09:14:49 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 385 (385) [This note has 62 lines beginning with this one.] First things first: first, all praise to Philippa MW Matheson and all generous souls everywhere who share the fruits of their keyboarding. So far, I have never found a way to get a formal legal opinion from (say) a university counsel, on the issue of the copyright status of a text keyboarded for personal use and distributed to friends or colleagues. If anyone out there has, please speak up. Surely one could argue that a text, even one in copyright, keyboarded for research purposes into a single computer and accessible only to the originator, would fall under the scope of 'fair use'. If I can make a single photocopy for personal use, why not a machine copy? Distribution to friends and colleagues might also be fair use -- I'd hate to have to prove in court that it wasn't. (Or that it was.) Distribution to all comers, it seems, would be much easier to class as 'publication' of the sort copyright law forbids. Of course, the presses can be much less generous in their interpretation. As well they might, when a machine-readable version can drive the typesetting of a pirated edition so easily. But perhaps they sometimes go a little too far. The editor of a critical edition of T______ wrote to the press, a few years ago, mentioning that a colleague at another school was interested in preparing a concordance of the new critical edition. Indeed, this colleague had already typed Vol. 1 in and concorded it, which demonstrated the seriousness and the technical feasibility of the request. Could copies of the typesetting tapes of the later volumes be made available to simplify preparation of the text -- and would the press be interested in publishing the concordance? Answer: a flat no, and an assertion that the concordance-maker was in violation of the press's copyright, even though the concordance made was for personal use and neither it nor the text had been distributed to anyone. Of course, in the case of Soviet materials there may be special considerations. There was a time when the USSR subscribed to the 'wrong' copyright convention and Soviet materials did not have much if any legal protection in the west (or vice versa). A few years ago there were stories about that being changed, the better to suppress Western republication of smuggled mss. But there may still be some special legal technicalities regarding Soviet materials. Some people tell me presses are more enlightened now -- and indeed many presses have given their consent to the scanning of copyright Dante commentaries for the Dartmouth Dante Project. Perhaps the rule is that everyone likes to be asked. It's not as though most scholarly presses expected to make a lot of money selling the rights to journal translations. So my advice in dealing with copyright materials would be: ask. (If they say no, what have you lost? You can always say 'Article X is unavailable for copyright reasons.') We should hammer and hammer at our publishers and ourselves and colleagues, though, until we achieve wide public acceptance of unhindered distribution of electronic texts for research purposes. No pirating, no intellectual theft, full documentation of the source of both the original and the electronic form -- get that accepted as the basic code of practice, and I think we'll be making progress. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago From: Norman Zacour 923 9483 Subject: Date: 24 October 1987, 22:25:53 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 386 (386) The following has 32 lines. Subject: Copyright. I doubt very much that making a copy of someone else's work to be distributed to friends and colleagues can be defined as `fair use' either legally or morally. To duplicate a copyrighted work instead of buying it is to deny the author's rights; thinking otherwise is a measure of the anesthetizing effect of the Xerox machine on our moral sense. No one objects to having their scholarly works, say, used by others in their research - that's what they were produced for. That doesn't mean that they can be copied and handed about indiscriminately by someone else as though by right. Compensation, usually monetary, is not always so; an acknowledgement of permission, a return of favour, enhancement of prestige, or merely simple courtesy, all play a part in the outcome of what Sperberg-McQueen has characterized as `being asked' - but surely, the choice is the author's, not the copier's. I gather from Philippa Matheson that archives are not mere depositories, but in some instances act as publishers - at least, if making someone's work public is still called publishing. This is muddy ground: if you are going to deposit your work in a public archive, failing specific instructions about its disposition, there is a good argument that you are releasing it to the public ipso facto.The one thing we can be sure of is that this and other such problems won't be decided by humanist discussions, but rather in the courts, on the basis of legal precedents, which means the application of legal principles developed before electronic publishing was dreamed of. As for the rest, I do not think that Philippa Matheson has much of a problem. A lawyer specializing in copyright would probably know about international conventions touching on Russian publications, but five roubles will get you fifty that translations of Russian scholarly publications will require the formal permission of the publisher. On the other hand, the bibliography of such translations is all her own, to publish as she may wish. In doing so she might be revealing a slightly illegal operation, but if she wants to cast her bread upon the waters, who shall say her nay? May she have a rich return in mighty fishes. From: IMD7VAW@UCLAMVSPostmanIMD7VAW Subject: ACH newsletterUndelivered mailACH Newsletter Date: Mon, 26 Oct 87 13:29 PSTMon, 26 Oct 87 13:28 PSTMon, 26 Oct 87 13:28 PST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 387 (387) Your mail was not delivered to some or all of its intended recipients for the following reason(s): 5001 mailbox invalid -> HUMANIST ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ACH members, Due to an unfortunate error at the printers, some of the recent ACH Newsletters are missing pages. Let me know if you would like a new copy. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it did show that some people do read it, which I'm glad to hear. Vicky Walsh = IMD7VAW@UCLAMVS From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASHugh Kenner Subject: Re: Copyright Date: 27 October 1987, 11:18:35 ESTSat, 24 Oct 87 9:53:46 EDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 388 (388) The following somehow arrived in our postmaster's mailbox instead of HUMANIST's. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the other hand, there is the advice I once received from the legal eagle at a friendly publisher's: If you are confident that what you are doing is Fair Use, then do NOT ask. Asking concedes the other party's right to refuse. The likelihood of your being dragged to court over, e.g., the keyboarding incident to making a concordance is vanishingly small. The likelihood of anyone's winning such a case against you is even smaller. --Hugh Kenner. From: CHURCHDM@VUCTRVAX Subject: SCANNING FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEXTS - Hard- and software Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 11:17 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 389 (389) Here is a summary of the responses I received in answer to my question about hard- and software for scanning text in foreign languages. Many thanks to all who replied. The new Kurzweil "desktop" scanner and the Palantir both use "smart" software to figure out problematic characters in a logical fashion (for English) . This procedure makes these machines read faster and more accurately, but it also makes it impossible for them to handle foreign languages, especially those with accented letters or non-Roman alphabets. Kurzweil has promised new software in the near future that will enable the desktop scanner to handle French. Other foreign languages are down the road a bit, but this solution is not ideal becaus e it means switching software each time one switches languages and will not accommodate mixtures of languages. The old Kurzweil scanners (e.g., Model 3) and the relatively new Model 4000 do not use the same type of software for recognition; instead they use a "training mode" that allows the user to tell the machine what the problematic characters are. It does that by scanning some text and then prompting the operator to enter characters (or combinations of up to three characters) for the unrecognized ones. While that approach may make the processing somewhat slower, it does allow for "training" the machine to recognize accented and even non-Roman characters. recognize accented and even non-Roman characters. From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen Subject: ACH work toward Text Encoding Guidelines Date: 27 October 1987 13:51:09 CDT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 390 (390) [This message has 106 lines counting from this one.] As Nancy Ide recently mentioned in passing in this discussion, the National Endowment for the Humanities recently funded the first phase of the ACH's project to develop guidelines for encoding texts in machine-readable form for research purposes. Since this project promises to have deep repercussions for those of us interested in computer-assisted textual studies -- and since the project is going to need a lot of work from interested humanists -- participants in these discussions may be interested in a little more information about it. (Let this also be a partial answer to those who have already contacted me privately for more information.) The Goal The point of the effort is to provide a single, rational set of guidelines for encoding machine-readable texts. Such guidelines should ideally prove useful to scholars encoding new texts, to those (including text archives) who exchange texts with others, and to software developers. If they can be made concrete enough, such guidelines could provide a standard, pre-defined interface between text-analysis software and the data they handle. If they can be made compatible with publishing-industry practice, such guidelines could make it easier to use the same text for publication (e.g. as a critical edition) and machine-based research with concordance and stylistic-analysis programs. The Phases of the Project The first phase of the project (funded by NEH) calls for a gathering of representatives from various text archives and learned societies to discuss the scope, structure, and basic plan (the 'architecture', if you will) of the guidelines. This meeting will take place next month at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Its result is to be a document formally describing the recommended architecture for the guidelines, and an understanding among the societies represented on how to organize the next steps of the process. In the second phase, a working party set up by the organizations collaborating in the work will first publish the architecture as defined at the Poughkeepsie conference, request comments on it, and revise it in the light of the comments. The working party will then draft the guidelines. When they are complete, the guidelines will themselves be circulated for public comment (this is phase 3) and revised. (Inter alia, I expect them to be posted on this list, or announced here and distributed electronically to those interested in commenting.) In phase 4, the collaborating organizations will formally validate and approve the guidelines by a mechanism yet to be chosen. Then (phase 5) the guidelines will be published. Questions for those on this list Although there will be ample time later for participants in these discussions to comment on the basic architecture and on the draft guidelines, it would nonetheless be useful to hear from those on the list concerning the scope and structure that they would like to see in a set of guidelines for text encoding practice. What kinds of texts, what languages, and what kinds of research should guidelines of this kind attempt to serve? It seems intuitively clear that if we attempt to settle practice for all languages and all scripts at the outset, we may never get the guidelines finished. But which scripts MUST be included at the outset, and which can be usefully postponed for later revisions or extensions of the guidelines? Can we limit ourselves for the moment to alphabetic scripts? To left-to-right alphabetic scripts? To Latin-based scripts? Which kinds of text-analysis ought to be planned into the guidelines? Concordance-making? Linguistic analysis? Archaeological analysis? That is, should the needs of classicists working with inscriptions be addressed? How about numismatists? Analytic bibliographers? Codicologists? Textual critics? In your own work as humanists or as computer consultants helping other humanists, you may already have -- or will someday -- spend some time working on texts encoded by someone else. When you do, what information about the text will you (did you) want that other person to have encoded with the text? Are page numbers important? Are chapter divisions? Line breaks in the original text? Source of the text (edition used for keyboarding)? Type style and size? When you encode texts yourself, and encounter a document entitled "Guidelines for Encoding Textual Material for Literary, Historical, or Linguistic Research" (or words to that effect) -- what will you want that document to explain? Should it tell you whether to encode the original page numbers or not? Should it tell you HOW to encode the page numbers (or the type size and leading and ...) if you want to do so, but refrain from telling you what to encode and what not to encode? (E.g. "If encoding page breaks, use the form '' where 'n' is an Arabic or Roman numeral. Use the form that appears on the page. If no number appears on the page, surround the numeral in square brackets: ''.") Or should guidelines of this sort confine themselves to defining a syntax for tags, telling you that, whatever you tag and however you tag it, you should precede each tag by a '<' or other delimiter, and follow it with a '>' or other delimiter, etc.? In sum, how much detail should be used to specify the WHAT, and how much detail for the HOW, of text tagging? While there will be, as I say, ample time to comment on these issues later, still it would be useful to know, going into the meeting next month, what feelings are on these questions among those on this list. I will be grateful for any comments (including ones to the effect that you don't have an opinion one way or the other). Thanks. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago From: Paul Bratley Subject: Student for sale Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 18:36-0500 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 391 (391) This message contains about 20 lines, give or take a few. I have a first-rate student for sale if anyone is interested. He expects to finish a masters in computer science in February 1988 or thereabouts. (I expect him to finish in April.) He would like to work abroad, that is, outside Canada, with a preference for Europe but the USA would do. He has helped me with a project involving lexical statistics on a corpus of Zola's novels, and his masters consists of an expert system (or some approximation thereto) for deciding questions about unemployment insurance, which I direct jointly with a member of our law faculty. As you will realise, his interests are in the applications of computers in a rather vague area including the humanities, socially-useful systems (he introduced me to the works of Trotsky some years ago), and so on. His mother tongue is French, but his English is competent. If anyone is looking for a good research assistant with a solid background in computer science, I can thoroughly recommend this young man. Any offers ? Paul Bratley Bitnet : 3935@umtrlvr Universite de Montreal CDNnet : bratley@iro.udem.cdn (514) 343-7478 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASamsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) Subject: Copyright and "Fair Use"Asking for Permission for Fair Use access Date: 28 October 1987, 11:31:24 ESTTue, 27 Oct 87 19:36:47 est X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 392 (392) The following has been rescued by the postmaster from oblivion at the wrong node. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A good description of the policy of not asking for permission when a use is clearly ``fair use'' is given in the Chicago Manual of Style. The ``right of fair use'' is somewhat seen as the same as a ``public right to passage'' and one which should not be weakened by asking for permission from those who presumably do not have any right to prevent ``fair use''. However, ``fair use'' of text doesn't yet have a very clear electronic counterpart. Copyright is a law designed to protect the financial interests of the originators of information. Those interests can be damaged, for instance, by not-for-profit exchanges of text which nevertheless deny the originator of the information a potential sale. So... the question is typically whether what one is doing could reasonably be accomplished by the recipients of the information buying it from the originator. Clearly quoting a paragraph or similar small portion of text is not likely to reduce the salability of the original text--but photocopying a whole article without permission and then distributing it for free to everyone could potentially reduce the revenue of the originators of the article. Note that educational and research use of text is specifically permitted in copyright law, but redistribution for non-educational purposes that could reduce purchases of the text would not be ``fair use''. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ALLC -- ICCH Conference (ca. 114 lines) Date: 2 November 1987, 08:42:49 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 393 (393) CALL FOR PAPERS Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Association for Computers and the Humanities 16th International ALLC Conference -- 9th ICCH Conference June 6-10, 1989 University of Toronto, Toronto Ontario, Canada The 16th International ALLC Conference and 9th International Conference on Computing and the Humanities will be held conjointly at the University of Toronto from June 6th to 10th, 1989. Papers on all aspects of computing in linguistics, ancient and modern languages and literatures, history, philosophy, art, archaeology and music are invited for presentation at the conference. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: authorship studies bibliography computer-aided instruction computer-assisted language learning computerized dictionaries concordances content analysis database grammar development systems historical simulation humanities computing centres lexicography lexicology literary statistics machine translation prosodic studies quantitative linguistics natural language processing scholarly publishing speech analysis stylistics teaching humanities computing textbase text enrichment text generation writing instruction The organizers are particularly interested in papers presenting the results of computer-aided work in the humanities. A 4-day software fair will be part of the conference and will include demonstrations using micro-computers or network connections back to mainframes. A published Software Fair Guide will be given to all registrants. Anyone wishing to present a paper or participate in the Software Fair should send three copies of an abstract of the paper or of a description of the software (approximately 1,000 words in either case) to Professor Ian Lancashire. This abstract should be received by October 15, 1988. The joint ALLC/ACH programme committee will then choose suitable submissions. Speakers or demonstrators of software will be informed by February 1, 1989, of the acceptance of their submissions. Final texts of papers and descriptions of software for the Software Fair Guide will be due in Toronto by May 1, 1989. Selected papers presented at the conference will be published the ALLC Conference Series. During the conference, time will be set aside for attendees to organize poster sessions, panel discussions and parallel groups. Anyone wishing to propose a meeting on a particular theme is requested to contact Professor Ian Lancashire. Working languages for the conference will be English and French. ACCOMMODATION The conference will be held on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, which is in the centre of the city and within easy walking distance of many hotels, restaurants and shops. Accommodation will be reserved at a nearby international hotel and in inexpensive student residences at Victoria College, about five minutes walk from the conference site. The city of Toronto is served by a large number of domestic and international airlines. DEADLINES October 15, 1988 Proposals for papers, panel discussions, and software demonstrations (1,000 words). February 1, 1989 Acceptance of proposals. April 1, 1989 Early bird registration; final texts due for Software Fair Guide. May 1, 1989 Deadline for submission of papers for published proceedings. June 6, 1989 Start of ALLC-ICCH Conference. June 10, 1989 Acceptance of papers for the published proceedings. For information, registration and submissions, contact Professor Ian Lancashire ALLC-ICCH Conference Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario CANADA M5S 1A5 (416) 978-4238 E-mail address: IAN @ UTOREPAS.BITNET From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: An editorial letter on reminders and improvements (ca. 30 lines) Date: 2 November 1987, 09:06:04 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 394 (394) Dear Colleagues: Those of you who occasionally use HUMANIST to make calls for papers, as Ian Lancashire just did for the 1989 ALLC/ICCH conference, might consider issuing periodic reminders. The conversational rhythm of an electronic discussion group tends not to favour long-term memory, and new members may miss these important announcements, which are wisely made well in advance of their events. I'll leave it to the organizer to decide what is a judicious reminder and what a bothersome bit of pestering. You may be interested to know that HUMANIST now has close to 140 members in 10 countries. So far I have noted only 3 or 4 dropouts. Pressure of time does not allow me to do a great deal of work with HUMANIST (the possibility of making periodic summaries, for example, daily recedes further into the realm of unfulfilled desire), but I would very much like to hear your suggestions about how HUMANIST could be improved. It has far outrun its editor's original ambitions and so become a much more useful and significant thing. Let's have the user-driven improvements continue. We are constrained by the combined limits of manpower and software, so some suggestions may be impractical or just impossible to realize, but your making them will show us what to aim for. Thank you all for your continuing participation. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: Ramana Subject: Has our local redistribution list been put on? Date: 7 Nov 87 02:02 PST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 395 (395) Can you check to make sure that XeroxHumanists~.x has been put on your distribution list. I haven't seen any traffic on this list, but so reference to it in another DL so believe that somehow we got dropped or never added. -- Ramana From: CMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Date: Tue, 10 Nov 87 11:55:41 GMT X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 396 (396) Most HUMANISTs in the UK will know about the 'Computers in Teaching Initiative' and I expect those over the water have come across references to it. Both groups would probably be interested in the final report on one of the first CTI projects, Project Pallas at Exeter, which aimed to bring computing to the whole Faculty of Arts in Exeter by provision of facilities in the building, staff, help with regular courses, and specific computing courses. The summary of three years work or more on Pallas makes an interesting read for anyone involved in a similar exercise (I should admit a certain bias as I used to work for Pallas). The report isn't exactly published, but I am sure Exeter will send copies to those who are interested. Try mailing BUCKETT@EK.AC.EXETER (Dr John Buckett, the project co-ordinator) and ask him how to get a copy. Maybe he could send a machine-readable version to Toronto for redistribution. I do point out that I mention this as a 'review' not an advert - dont ask me for a copy! Under the same CTI umbrella, my own institution, with York University, has just started a project to do with excavation simulation in archaeology. We are aiming to set up systems to help train students in the strategy and management decisions involved in running an archaeological 'intervention'. As an off-shoot of this, an ex-Southampton student (Susanna Hawkins) wrote an MSc report at the LSE on the background to the CTI and the place of CAL in archaeology with reference to the aims of SYASS (our scheme). If any HUMANISTs would like to receive copies of this, and other documents relating to SYASS, they should contact me, with a note of what sort of documents they can use (the choice is LaTeX, troff/nroff 'mm' or formatted ASCII). The Hawkins report is about 30 pages formatted. In general, archaeological HUMANISTs are invited to send me their mail addresses so I can pass on any material that passes through my hands; this latter appeal is on behalf of the yearly "Computer Applications in Archaeology" conference, whose mailing list (paper and electronic) I am setting up and maintaining. If you are already on the paper list but have an e-mail, please send it to me. sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: Steve Younker Subject: More Junk Mail Date: Tue, 10 Nov 87 11:40:01 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 397 (397) By now, most of you are probably aware of a flood of junk mail coming from HUMANIST. I believe I have stopped it for now. The cause is still under investigation. Since Willard has been out of town, I was not aware that all HUMANIST subscribers were receiving the junk files that I was getting. Only when a couple of you brought it to my attention this morning did I realize that there was a larger problem. My thanks to those of you who sent me the information. When I have an explanation for what has happened, either Willard or I will try to inform you of the cause of this inundation of mail. Please just delete the offending mail and carry on. Well, back to the salt mine! :-) Steve From: Steve Younker Subject: Strange Mail Date: Tue, 10 Nov 87 16:54:13 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 398 (398) I'm terribly sorry to do this to you, but this junk mail problem is more complicated than I thought. The purpose of this file is to create some MORE junk mail. I'm collaborating with our systems people in tracking down the source of the problem. So, please keep deleting the junk and sending in your normal submissions. I know the junk mail is annoying, but you should see it from this end! Thanks for your patience. Steve From: Steve Younker Subject: LISTSERV going bananas Date: Wed, 11 Nov 87 10:04:38 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 399 (399) I got in this morning and to my dismay I find that HUMANISTS have once again been buried under a wave of bad headers. At this point to save you all from the frustration of further nonsense, I am suspending HUMANIST for probably the next 24 hours. If I can solve the problem before then, so much the better. You will receive another note from me telling you when it is once more safe to venture forward with HUMANIST. Hope to talk to you all soon. Steve From: R.J.HARE@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Subject: TECH88 (about 40 lines) Date: 11 Nov 87 09:25:24 gmt X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 400 (400) TECH88 A Project on TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMANITIES April to September 1988 An enquiry into the complex interplay between technology, communication and the humanities, bringing together representatives from higher education, the arts, commerce and industry. Public Lectures ------ -------- Five public lectures will be held during July and August 1988 under the following general headings: 15 July Technology, Finance and Economics 22 July Technology and transport 29 July Technology, the Media and the Humanities 5 August Management, Education and Anti-Technology 12 August Free Enquiry in a Competitive Market: The Implications of Data banks and targeted Advertising. Conference on Technology, Communication and the Humanities ---------- -- ---------- ------------- --- --- ---------- A Major inter-disciplinary conference to be held at the University of Edinburgh from 18 to 21 August 1988, mounted in association with the TeCH 88 Project, and organised by the Institute. The main themes are: - Technology and decision making - Technology and the dissemination of information - Technology and the acquisition of knowledge - Technology and creative design - Technology and daily life Participants who wish to deliver a paper (in English) should contact the Director of the Institute for further particulars, indicating their proposed topic by 1 March 1988. Fellowships ----------- Further information is available from the Director of the Institute. Address for further information: ------- --- ------- ----------- Institue for Advanced Studies in the Humanities University of Edinburgh Hope Park Square Edinburgh EH8 9NW Scotland From: Steve Younker Subject: Welcome Back Date: Thu, 12 Nov 87 16:56:10 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 401 (401) Hello folks, Well, after a pretty intensive search of various logs, we feel that we have found the perpetrator of the junk mail. As far as we can tell, this person probably does not know he was causing the problem. He has been temporarily removed from the list. We will try an alternate method for his inclusion. What we don't know at this time is the EXACT reason for the problem. This is the subject of further research for a group of us at the UofT. I am bringing HUMANIST up this afternoon and I'm going to let it run overnight. If all goes well, it will remain up for the weekend. There is a slight possibility of further rejection notices being transmitted to all of you. However, I believe this possibility is very slight. I hope I don't have to eat my words. :-) I am going to be out of town for the weekend, so I won't be here to strangle HUMANIST if it runs riot once again. There will be another person who has the ability to stem the tide if this becomes necessary. Of course, on a weekend the trick is to notice a problem in the first place. So, please continue to show patience if the dam breaks once again. When I have a proper explanation for this problem, I will pass it on to you. Meanwhile, please carry on with your discussions. Thanks once again, Steve From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Post mortem, in 56 lines Date: 12 November 1987, 21:07:55 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 402 (402) Dear Colleagues: In view of the recent disaster on HUMANIST, which filled up readers around the world, I have added a new section to the electronic guidebook sent to all new members. This section is reproduced below. I would very much appreciate your comments, sent directly to me. I hope that you've recovered. You will appreciate my dismay when returning from a stimulating and enjoyable conference in Waterloo, Ontario (on the use of large textual databases) I was confronted with 247 messages in my reader! You see, for every bad message you get, I get at least two. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E. Junk Mail and other Network Problems --------------------------------------------------------------------- It is important to realize that HUMANIST is a highly complex web of individuals using a wide variety of computing systems linked together by several different electronic networks. Few of the many parts that comprise HUMANIST were designed to work together. Because HUMANIST's software, ListServ, is rarely able to distinguish between an original message from a member and an error message from a member's system or from some intervening node, it is highly susceptible to both human and mechanical mistakes. Others have commented that we have done well with human errors. Experience has shown, however, that under the present order of things serious floods of meaningless junk mail are exceedingly difficult to prevent. These floods, some say, are simply the price of belonging to the group. A flood of junk mail can be a serious matter to some. A member's reader can fill up quickly, causing much inconvenience and, perhaps, loss of meaningful e-mail. The editor and postmaster of HUMANIST do what they can to intervene once a flood has started, but even they must sleep, whereas our sometimes disobedient electronic servants do not. Individual members can help prevent a few such problems. One way is to be careful to specify reliable addresses. In some cases the advice of local experts may help. Any member who changes his or her userid or nodename should first give ample warning to the editor and should verify the new address. Accounts should not be left unwatched and unused. If you are planning to be away for more than a few days, make certain that your account can cope with a significant number of messages, or ask the editor to delete you temporarily from the list. (You will need to send him a subsequent request to be restored to the list when you return.) If you know your system is going to be turned off or otherwise adjusted in a major way, find out when it will be out of service and inform the editor. All the precautions in the world will not prevent some floods of junk mail, however. Ultimately a more perfect network depends on our appreciative insistence that the effort be spent in improving it. Meanwhile patience is required. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Optical scanners (39 lines) Date: 15 November 1987, 11:14:00 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 403 (403) The following is from Dan Church -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a summary of the responses I received in answer to my question about hard- and software for scanning text in foreign languages. Many thanks to all who replied. The new Kurzweil "desktop" scanner and the Palantir both use "smart" software to figure out problematic characters in a logical fashion (for English). This procedure makes these machines read faster and more accurately, but it also makes it impossible for them to handle foreign languages, especially those with accented letters or non-Roman alphabets. Kurzweil has promised new software in the near future that will enable the desktop scanner to handle French. Other foreign languages are down the road a bit, but this solution is not ideal because it means switching software each time one switches languages and will not accommodate mixtures of languages. The old Kurzweil scanners (e.g., Model 3) and the relatively new Model 4000 do not use the same type of software for recognition; instead they use a "training mode" that allows the user to tell the machine what the problematic characters are. It does that by scanning some text and then prompting the operator to enter characters (or combinations of up to three characters) for the unrecognized ones. While that approach may make the processing somewhat slower, it does allow for "training" the machine to recognize accented and even non-Roman characters. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Biographical supplement (38.5K) Date: 15 November 1987, 11:40:49 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 404 (404) Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Fourth Supplement Following are 26 additional entries to the collection of autobiographies by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. Additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to mccarty@utorepas.bitnet. W.M. 15 November 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 405 (405) *Amsler, Robert Bell Communications Research, Morristown, N.J. Despite the fact that I feel I have almost exclusively a background in the sciences, I find that I am continually working with people from the humanities and have been doing so for the last 12 or so years. I graduated from college with a B.S. in math and went on to graduate school at NYU's Courant Inst. of Math. Sciences in Greenwich Village. There I changed from a mathematician to a computer scientist--and even more significantly, to a computational linguist. I just decided one day that it was a lot more fun to see computers printing words than numbers. From NYU I went to the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where I worked with Robert F. Simmons for a number of years. Texas became home for 10 years and I eventually worked on a variety of humanities computing projects there as the programming manager of the linguistics research center in the HRC (which many of us preferred to think of as the Humanities Research Center even after the University changed the name to the Harry Ransom Center). At UT I worked on machine-readable dictionaries and eventually did a dissertation entitled ``The Structure of the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary'' in which I proved you can construct taxonomies out of definitions. I also worked on a few other interesting humanities computing projects including providing the programming support (sorting, typesetting and syntax-checking) for Fran Karttunen's Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, building a concordance for Sanskrit texts, working on pattern recognition for Incunabula, data organization for a bibliography of literature of the 18th (or was it the 17th, sigh) century, Mayan calendar generation, and in general helping to spearhead an effort in the late 1970s to get the computing center to recognize text as a legitimate use of computing resources on campus. I have an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from UT in Computer Sciences (Computational Linguistics/Artificial Intelligence), Information Science, and Anthropological Linguistics (Ethnosemantics). After school, I went to SRI International in Menlo Park, CA and worked in the AI Center and the Advanced Computer Systems Dept. there for 3 years on a variety of projects and grants involving text, information science, and AI. From SRI I came to my present job at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, NJ in the Artificial Intelligence and Information Science Research Group, where I continue to specialize in working on machine-readable dictionary research (computational lexicology) and in general on finding alternate uses for machine-readable text. I'm a member of AAAI, ACL, AAAS, ACM, DSNA, and IEEE. My long-term interest is in trying to understand what it will mean to us in the future to have all the world's text information accessible to computers, and what the computers will be able to figure out from that information. Most recently, my attention has turned to the need to create some standards for the encoding of machine-readable dictionaries and to data entry of the Century Dictionary. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 406 (406) *Benson, Jim English Department, Glendon College, York University, Toronto I use the CLOC package developed at the University of Birmingham for research purposes, which include statistical interpretations of collocational output for natural language texts. CLOC also produces concordances, indexes, etc. similar to the OCP. At York, CLOC is also currently being used to produce an old spelling concordance of Shakespeare. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 407 (407) *Bevan, Edis 014 Gardiner Building, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, Great Britain. (The Open University is the biggest University in Britain in terms of student numbers. Instruction is at a distance by means of broadcast materials, written texts and some local tuition. The University has on its undergraduate programme more students with disabilities than all the other higher education institutions in Britain combined.) I intend to set up a discussion group which I hope will be as international as HUMANIST. This will probably be called ABLENET, and I am discussing with Andy Boddington how we could operate as a kind of pseudo-LISTSERVE. Participating in HUMANIST would give me some insights into how such a system could operate effectively. I believe good information exchange is as much a matter of developing communicative competence amongst the users as it is in manipulating the technologies. I am told that HUMANIST is an example of good practice in this matter. I also believe that HUMANIST debates could be most relevant to my general research into information and empowerment. It is not just a matter of applying modern technology to the specific needs of individual disabled people, great through the benefits of this can be. The information technology revolution is creating a whole new world, and it is largely being created for able bodied living with some afterthoughts for possible benefits for people with disabilities. Also there is no reason why disabled people of high academic capability should not be interested in the humanities and in computing in the Humanities. I intend to prepare a directory of resources for disabled people who want to initiate or carry through research projects for themselves. If they become interested in the humanities then HUMANIST could be a relevant resource for them. Furthermore, since I want to make this a truly international resource I need to look at the problems of information exchange in languages other that English. This may be relevant to your concerns with linguistic computing. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 408 (408) *Butler, Terry I am active in supporting humanities computing at the University of Alberta. I am in the University Computing Systems department. We have the OCP program on our mainframe, TextPack (from Germany) recently installed, and a number of other utilites and program being used by scholars. We have considerable experience in publishing and data base publishing (I am in the Information Systems unit). I have a masters degree in English Literature from this university. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 409 (409) *Cerny, Jim University Computing, University of New Hampshire Kingsbury Hall, Durham, NH 03824. (603)-862-3058 I am the site INFOREP for BITNET purposes and part of the academic support staff in the computer center. We have only been part of BITNET since mid-April-87, so I am working hard to find out what is "out there" and to let our user community know about it. I am especially working hard to show these possibilities to faculty from non-traditional computing backgrounds, such as in the humanities. I am publisher of our campus computer newsletter, ON-LINE, which we produce with Macintosh desktop publishing tools. We are always interested in exchanging newsletter subscriptions with other newsletter publishers/editors. As for myself, I am a wayward geographer, Ph.D. from Clark Univ., cartography as a specialization, and I teach one credit course (adjunct) per year. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 410 (410) *Chapelle, Carol 203 Ross Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011. (515) 294-7274 I am an assistant professor of ESL/Applied Linguistics at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. I am interested in the application of computers for teaching English and research on second language acquisition. My papers on these topics have appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Language Learning, CALICO, and SYSTEM. My current work includes writing courseware for ESL instruction and research, and developing a "computers in linguistics/humanities" course for graduate students at ISU. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 411 (411) *Cooper, John I am working on a UK government sponsored project under the Computer Teaching Initiative umbrella. The project is headed by Susan Hockey, and the third member is Jo Freedman. We are developing ways in which texts in several languages and scripts can be accessed by university members (undergraduates initially, but we hope that graduates and researchers will be able to make use of the facilities) directly onto micro screens connected up with the university mainframe computers. They will be able to see their texts in the original scripts, and then be able to use concordance programs such as OCP and other text-oriented software to performs searches, etc., of their material. At present we are working with Middle English, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Arabic, but we are interested in incorporating any scripts and languages for which there is a demand in the university. Jo Freedman is languages for which there is a demand in the university. I am working partcularly on the textual side of the project, and we are using texts from the Oxford Text Archive to begin with. My particular interest is in Arabic and other languages written in the Arabic script, and I am at present working on a thesis in the field of Islamic jurisprudence. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 412 (412) *Feld, Michael I currently teach Philosophy at University College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2M8 (204) 474-9136. My use of computers is a newborn thing: primarily, as yet, to access data-bases, and to communicate with other scholars in my field via e-mail. My research interests center on moral epistemology and applied ethics. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 413 (413) *Friedman, Edward A. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030 USA. 201-420-5188 I am currently a Professor of Management at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA. Previously, as Dean of the College I had administrative responsibility for the development of the computer-intensive environment at Stevens. Every student had to purchase a computer ( beginning in 1983 ). The first computer was a DEC Professional 350 and now it is an AT&T 6310. A great deal of curriculum development has taken place at Stevens around this program. We are currently engaged in a massive networking effort which will place more than 2,000 computers on a 10Megabit/sec Ethernet with interprocess communications functionality. My interest is in uses of information technology in society and in the impact of information technology on liberal arts students. I recently had a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to complete a text of information technology for liberal arts students that will be published by MIT Press. I currently have a grant from the Department of Higher Education of the State of New Jersey to implement an undergraduate course using full text search techniques. We are placing approximately ten volumes related to Galileo into machine-readable form. They include writings of Galileo, biographical material and commentaries. This data base will be used with Micro-ARRAS software in a history of science course on Galileo. I am working with Professor James E. McClellan of the Stevens Humanities Department and with Professor Arthur Shapiro of the Stevens Manangement Department on this project. I would be interested in hearing from individuals who have suggestions for experiments or observations that we might consider in this pilot project when it is implemented in the Spring Semester ( Feb - May 1988 ). I am also a founder and Co-Editor of a journal entitled, Machine-Mediated Learning, that is published by Taylor & Francis of London. The Journal is interested in in-depth articles that would be helpful to a wide audience of scholars and decision makers. Anyone wishing to see a sample copy should contact me. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 414 (414) *Gauthier, Robert Sciences du langage, UNIVERSITE TOULOUSE-LE MIRAIL (61 81 35 49), France I am at present head of the "Sciences du Langage" Department at the "Universite Toulouse le-Mirail". I spent twenty years out of France mainly in Africa where I taught linguistics and semiotics. I started as a phonetician with a these de 3eme Cycle on teaching intonation to students learning French (FLE equivalent to TEFL). I worked for various international organisations (UNESCO, USAID, AUPELF) and the French Cooperation. I was then mainly interested in Audio-visual methods of teaching sundry subjects. I got involved in research on local folktales and wrote a few articles on the subject. I have been using computers for 10 years as a means of research, filing, word-processing, and intellectual enjoyment. I learnt and used a few languages (Fortran, Basic, Logo, Prolog...) and worked on different computers. After a These d'etat on the didactical use of pictures in growing up Africa, I came home to the Linguistics department of Toulouse university. I teach Computers or Semiotics at "Maitrise" level and I have a "Seminaire de DEA" on Communication and computed meaning (an unsatisfactory translation of the ambiguous french expression : Calcul du sens). The whole university shows a keen interest in computers and we have to fill in lots of forms to give shape to projects which aim to develop the teaching and use of computers in the Humanities. Unfortunately local problems prevent the university from having an efficient program to give students some kind of competence in dealing with Computers. In fact nobody seems aware of the specific problem posed by our literary students and their confrontation with courses given by specialists. As for what should be taught and how, this is either taboo or an irrelevant impropriety. In July 87 at the Colloque d'Albi, I presented a paper, which tried to promote a way to teach Basic to students with a literary background and I will try to perfect the method this year with the students attending my course on Basic and the Computer. I have just completed a stand alone application that helps make, merge, sort and edit bibliographies. It works on Macintosh and can be ported on IBM PC ( It was compiled with ZBasic). I am interested in hearing from persons using Expercommon Lisp on Macintosh for an exchange of views. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 415 (415) *Graham, David Department of French and Spanish, Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, NF CANADA A1B 3X9 (709) 737-7636 I was trained in 17th century French literature but have in the last few years become more interested in the history of emblematics in France. To this end, I am now investigating the feasibility of a com- puterized visual database of French emblems, and am currently exploring the use of Hypercard on a Macintosh Plus to work on this. In addition, for the last few months I have been attempting to encourage the formation of a distribution list for French language and literature specialists in Canada along the lines of ENGLISH@CANADA01 (though I understand it has not been a complete success...). Consequently, I am very interested in the use of e-mail by scholars and teachers in the hu- manities generally. We are at present looking into the use of computers for teaching FSL here at Memorial and so I would be interested in exchanges of views and material on that subject as well. I am not however personally interested in parsers etc though I have colleagues here who are. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 416 (416) *Hawthorne, Doug Director, Project Eli, Yale Computer Center, 175 Whitney Ave. New Haven, CT 06520, (203) 432-6680 My office is responsible in broad terms for providing the resources to support instructional computing at Yale. In addition to managing the public clusters of microcomputers available to students, I and my staff assist faculty who are searching for software to use for instruction or who are actively developing such software. In order to fulfill this role we attempt to stay abreast of recent developments and to funnel appropriate information to interested faculty at Yale. While not focussed exclusively on the humanities, we do give considerable attention to the humanists because they do not seem to be as "connected" to matters concerning computing as the scientists. But one example, I have been the principal organizer of a one day conference titled "Beyond Word Processing: A Symposium on the Use of Computers in the Humanities" which will be held tomorrow (Nov. 7). I look forward to participating in the network. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 417 (417) *Hofland, Knut The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities P.O. Box 53, University N-5027 Bergen Norway Tel: +47 5 212954/5/6 I am a senior consultant at the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities in Bergen (financed by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and Arts), where I have been working since 1975. The Centre is located at the University of Bergen. I have worked with concordancing, lemmatizing and tagging of million words text like the Brown Corpus, LOB Corpus, Ibsens poems and plays. I have also worked with publication of material via microfiche, typesetters and laserwriters. We are a clearing house for ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern English), a collection of different text corpora, and have recently set up a file server on Bitnet for distribution of information and programs. (FAFSRV at NOBERGEN, can take orders via msgs or mail). At the moment we are investigating the use of CD-ROM and WORM disks for distribution of material. We have worked for several years with computer applications in Museums, printed catalogues and data bases both on mainframes and PCs. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 418 (418) *Hogenraad, Robert Faculte de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Universite Catholique de Louvain 20, Voie du Roman Pays B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) For some time, I have been active here in the field of computer-assisted content analysis (limited to mainframe computers, alas, for financial reasons). For example, we recently issued a User's Manual --in French--for our recent PROTAN system (PROTAN for PROTocol ANalyzer). We intend some more work on our system in two directions, i.e., developing a sequential/narrative approach to content analysis, and developing new dictionaries, in French, in addition to the ones we already work with. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 419 (419) *Hughes, John J. Bits & Bytes Computer Resources, 623 Iowa Ave., Whitefish, MT 59937; telephones: (406) 862-7280; (406) 862-3927. Editor/Publisher of the "Bits & Bytes Review." After attending Vanderbilt University (1965-1969, philosophy), Westminster Theological Seminary (1970-1973, philosophical theology), and Cambridge University (1973-1977, biblical studies), I taught in the Religious Studies Department at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California (1977-1982). During 1980-1981, while teaching third-semester Greek at Westmont College, I attempted to use Westmont's Prime 1 to run GRAMCORD, a program that concords grammatical constructions in a morphologically and syntactically tagged version of the Greek New Testament. I had no idea how to use the Prime 1, and no one at the college had ever used GRAMCORD. Several frustrating visits to the computer lab neither quenched my desire to use the program nor dispelled my elitist belief that if students (some of whom, after reading their term papers, I deemed barely literate) could use the Prime 1 productively, then so could I. (The students, of course, immediately saw that I was as illiterate a would-be computer user as ever fumbled at a keyboard or read incomprehendingly through jargon-filled manuals.) My unspoken snobbery was not soon rewarded. After several spectacular and dismal failures (including catching a high-speed line-printer in an endless loop), I welcomed--indeed, solicited--the assistance of one and all, "literate" or not. After a good deal of help, my class and I were able to use GRAMCORD. Because of the system software or the way the program was installed or both, however, users had to wait 24 hours before the results of GRAMCORD operations were available. That delay did little to encourage regular use of the program, though it did illustrate the difference between batch and interactive processing. More recently, after three and a half years of research and writing, I have just completed "Bits, Bytes, and Biblical In October 1986, while researching and writing "Bits, Bytes, and Biblical Studies," I started the "Bits & Bytes Review," a review-oriented newsletter for academic and humanistic computing. This publication reviews microcomputer products in considerable detail, from the perspective of humanists, and in terms of how the products can enhance research and increase productivity. The newsletter appears nine times a year and is available to members of the Association for Computing in the Humanities at reduced rates. (Free sample copies are available from the publisher.) I am a member of the Association for Computing in the Humanities and a contributing editor to "The Electronic Scholar's Resource Guide" (Edited by Joseph Raben, Oryx Press, forthcoming). During the summer of 1988, I will teach an introductory-level course on academic word processing, desktop publishing, and text-retrieval programs at the University of Leuven through the Penn-Leuven Summer Institute. I am interested in using available electronic resources and tools to study the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, and the Greek New Testament. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 420 (420) *Julien, Jacques I am assistant-professor at the Department of French & Spanish at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. I am teaching language classes and French-Canadian literature and civilization. My field of research is French-Canadian popular song. I will have my Ph.D. thesis published in Montreal in next November. My subject was the popular singer: Robert Charlebois, and I have received my degree from the University of Sherbrooke, in 1983. I am working on a IBM/PC/XT compatable that can access the mainframe (VMS) through Kermit. Nota Bene is the wordprocessor I use more often. I am planning to use AskSam, by Seaside Software, a Text Base Management System, and SATO, from UQAM. I may say that my reasearch is based on computer assistance, as is my instruction. For example, I am very much interested at the software Greg Lessard is working on for interactive writing in French. Keywords that can define my work and my interests would be: French-Canadian literature and civilization, semiotics, sociology, CAI of French, stylistic analysis and Text Base Management. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 421 (421) *Kenner, Hugh I am Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities (English) at Johns Hopkins. I co-authored the "Travesty" program in the November '86 BYTE. With my students, I do word-analysis of Joyce's Ulysses, using copies of the master tapes for the Gabler edition. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 422 (422) *Lancashire, Ian Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Robarts Library, 14th Floor, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5; (416) 978-8656. I am a Professor of English who became interested in applying database and text-editing programs to bibliographical indexes for pre-1642 British records of drama and minstrelsy. Somewhat earlier I had done concording for an edition of two early Tudor plays. These in turn led me in 1983 to offer a graduate course introducing doctoral students in English to research computing; and to help, my department offered to publish a textbook summarizing documentation and collecting scattered information. With the support of like-minded colleagues, especially John Hurd and Russ Wooldridge, I urged the university to set up a natural-language-processing facility. The Vice-President of Research obliged by doing so and giving us a full-time programmer at Computing Services. I worked with him on a collection of text utilities called MTAS, which we developed on an IBM PC-AT given by IBM Canada Ltd. Then we organized a conference on humanities computing at Toronto in April 1986, and a month later IBM Canada and the university signed a joint partnership to set up a Centre for Computing in the Humanities here. Four laboratories and a staff of five later, I am still a director who enjoys every hour of the extraordinary experience of leading people where they want to go, one of whom, the creator of HUMANIST, is a gentleman scholar who has worked with me from the mid-seventies and whose talents are fully revealed in the Toronto centre. My own research? I co-edit The Humanities Computing Yearbook, am interested in distributional statistical analysis of text (content analysis with pictures), and am working with Alistair Fox and Greg Waite of the University of Otago (New Zealand) and George Rigg of Medieval Studies at Toronto on an English Renaissance textbase, with emphasis on the dictionaries published at that time. I have given a fair number of well-meaning talks about the importance of humanities computing, a few of which have been published. I am optimistic that eventually some serious scholarship will come of all this chatter. My wife is a professor of English too, and we have three children, one cat, and five microcomputers between us. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 423 (423) *Martindale, Colin Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469 I guess that the main way that I support computing in the humanities is by doing it. I have been working in the area of computerized content analysis for about 20 years. I have constructed several programs and dictionaries that I have used mainly to test my theory of literary evolution originally described in my book, Romantic Progression (1975). More recent publications are in CHum (1984) and Poetics (1978, 1986). I have tried to convince--with some success--colleagues in the humanities to use quantitative techniques and computers. With more success, I have interested grad students in psychology to use computerized content analysis to study literature and music . From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 424 (424) *Miller, Stephen External Adviser, Computing in the Arts, Oxford University Computing Service, 13, Banbury Road, Oxford. OX2 6NN. 0865-273266 I would like to join HUMANIST - my role in the computing service here is to handle enquiries about computer applications in the humanities from users outside of Oxford in the main but also to provide an internal service if I can be of assistance From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 425 (425) *Nash, David MIT Center for Cognitive Science, 20B-225 MIT, Cambridge MA 02139 tel. (617)253-7355 (until Jan. 1988) I am involved in two projects which link computers, linguists, and word lists (and also text archives), namely the Warlpiri Dictionary Project (at the Center for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Warlpiri schools in central Australia), and the National Lexicography Project at AIAS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies). The latter is a clearinghouse for Australian language dictionaries and word lists on computer media, recently begun, and funded until March 1989. Contact AIAS, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia; or the address below until next January. At the Center for Cognitive Science we use a DEC microVax, and Gnu Emacs and (La)TeX. We also use CP/M machines, and a Macintosh SE at AIAS, and have access to larger machines such as a Vax for data transfer. My training and interests are in linguistics and Australian languages. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 426 (426) *O'Cathasaigh, Sean French Department, The University, Southampton SO9 5NH England I work in the French Department at Southampton, where I use microcomputers for teaching grammar and the mainframe for generating concordances of French classical texts. I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who has used Deredec or its associated packages. I've thought of buying them for my Department, but have found it very difficult to get information from the authors. So a user report would be very welcome. Please contact: From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 427 (427) *O'Flaherty, Brendan My interest in humanities computing is primarily in the archaeolaogical field. I did my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at University College, Cork and am currently Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology in Southampton (address: The University, Souhampton SO9 5NH). My interest in computing include Computer-aided learning, typesetting and databases. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 428 (428) *Paff, Toby C.I.T., 87 Prospect St., Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 609-452-6068 I support, along with Rich Giordano, almost every aspect of computing in the humanities, where humanities includes the broadest number of fields possible. This means in particular, text processing, database work as it relates to humanities, text analysis, and linguistic analysis. I work a good deal with Hebrew and Arabic fonts, and with faculty and students who work in that area. Occasional work crops up in Chinese, but that comes and goes in waves. I am a SPIRES programmer and support things like the university serials list. My background is, in fact, in library work, though I support almost nothing bibliographical at this point. Given the generally cooperative atmosphere at Princeton, I work with micros, minis and mainframes... CMS and UNIX both. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 429 (429) *Ruus, Lane Head, UBC Data Library, Data Library, University of British Columbia 6356 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5 (604) 228-5587 Academic background: anthropology, librarianship What I do: see the following. UBC DATA LIBRARY AS A TEXT ARCHIVE The UBC Data Library is jointly operated by the UBC Computing Centre and Library. Its basic functions are to acquire and maintain computer-readable non-bibliographic files, in all necessary disciplines, to support the research and teaching activities of the University, to provide the necessary user services, and to act as an archive for original research data that may be used for secondary analysis by others. The Data Library is committed to three basic principles: (a) expensive data files should not be duplicated among a variety of departments on campus, but should be acquired centrally and made available to all, (b) original data resulting from research, that might be subject to secondary analysis in the future, should be preserved for posterity, as are publications in other physical media. They should therefore be deposited in data archives, with the professional expertise to preserve this fragile medium for future analysis, and (c) one of the basic tenets of academic research is the citation of all sources used, so as to facilitate the peer review process. Data files should therefore be cited, in publications, as are as a matter of course all other media of publication. Through such acknowledgement, creators of data will be encouraged to make their data available for secondary analysis. The Data Library's collection contains over 4600 files. Because of the size of the collection, all data are stored on magnetic tapes. Files vary in size from ten card images to a hundred million bytes or more. Subject matter varies from the Old Testament in Hebrew, to images from the polar-orbiting NOAA satellites. Data files are ordered from other data archives/libraries, on request (and as our budget allows), or are deposited by individual researchers. At present, the Data Library has textual data files in the following broad subject areas: American fiction, American poetry, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Bible (New Testament, Old Testament), Canadian poetry, English drama, English fiction, English poetry, French diaries, French language (word frequency, literature, poetry), German poetry, Greek (drama, language, literature, poetry), Hebrew literature, Indians of North America - British Columbia - legends, Irish fiction (English), Latin literature. All files are accessible at all times that the UBC G-system mainframe is operating in attended mode. Text files are generally maintained in the format in which they are received from the distributor. Generally this allows the researcher maximum flexibility to choose his/her favourite analysis package (e.g. OCP), download to a microcomputer, etc. Occasionally, the Data Library will compile an index to the contents of a large, complex file, or otherwise compile a computer-readable codebook. The Data Library maintains a catalogue of its collection under the SPIRES database management system, on the UBC G- system mainframe. Each record in the database contains information as to the substantive content, size, format, and availability of data files. It also includes information as to where documentation describing the files is to be found (whether on-line disc files or printed), and the information needed to mount the tape containing the file. The Data Library also maintains, on the G-system, an interactive documentation system. The system includes documents introducing the Data Library, how to mount Data Library owned tapes, as well as documents describing how to compile a bibliographic citation for a data file, how to deposit data files in the Data Library, etc. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 430 (430) *Tompkins, Kenneth ARHU, Stockton State College, Pomona, NJ 08240 (609) 652-4497 (work) or (609) 646-5452 (home) Fundamentally, I support computing in the Humanities by witnessing. In 1981, I set up the college Microlab so that (1) there would be a place for the whole college to learn about micros and what can be done with them; and (2) so that non-information science students could have a place to work. Since then, I have held yearly faculty workshops, set up over 200 computers across the campus, designed an Electronic Publishing track in the Literature Program (English Dept.), set up a college BBS, and done anything I could to make sure my colleagues have a chance to use computers in their teaching and research. I did teach a course called Computers and the Humanities which was not an unqualified success. Oh yes, I built my first micro in 1975. My role, then, is to witness, persuade, pound on tables, cajole, and to make myself heard by busy, somewhat uncaring administrators and by overworked and fearful colleagues. I am a Medievalist and I have been teaching at undergraduate colleges since 1965. I came to Stockton as one of a five person team to start the college; after 15 months of work designing the curriculum and hiring 55 faculty, the college opened in 1971. I was Dean of General Studies until 1973 when I returned to full time teaching. Since 1978 I have been spending my summers at Wharram Percy in the Yorkshire Wolds. Wharram Percy is a Deserted Medieval Village archeaological dig. I am now the Chief Guide; last summer I led tours for over 1100 visitors. I have co-authored a small booklet on Deserted Villages. I am very interested in how computers can be applied to archeaology. My other projects involve graphic input to computers. At present, I have built digitizing boards and hope to begin digitizing Celtic art so that these complex pictures can be broken into constituent parts. I am also interested in graphic reconstruction of medieval buildings. From: Mark Olsen Subject: Electronic Text Date: Sun, 15 Nov 87 18:35:12 MST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 431 (431) I have one suggestion for the ACH electronic text guidelines. You might want to include codes to represent the edition, volumes and page numbers of the texts in question. I gave a paper recently and used, without thinking really, program generated references to texts that I had collected and from the Constitution Papers published by the Electronic Text Corporation. The commentator suggested that I refer to hard copies of the texts. No problem for material I had assembled, tho' it was a pain in the ~&(*%. But I do not have an indication from ETC as to the edition, publishers or page numbers of the texts in that collection. The moral of this story? Include numbered page breaks and edition information in electronic text, or you will join me in the exceedingly frustrating task of hunting down hard copy references to text you have on-line. Mark From: Steve Younker Subject: We can all relax now (until next time) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 87 10:49:34 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 432 (432) Good Morning, As promised, I now include an explanation for the flood of junk mail we all received last week. The fault had two parts. The HUMANIST distribution list had a complex but valid address for certain subscribers. (A shorter one could have been used and will now be used for sure!) This was the seed of disaster in the complex world of electronic mail and was therefore the first part of the problem. The second part of the problem was a bug in some mail-handling software at a node between the UofT and the particular subscriber in question. My opposite number at that node found the bug when I sent him a sample of the output with which you all became so familiar last week. :-) The fix is also a two part affair: my colleague fixes his bug, and we use the shorter address. The shorter address also has the fortunate characteristic of bypassing my colleague's node. So, even if my friend doesn't fix his software, won't be flooded with bits and bytes, at least until some new quirk arises. The subscriber who (unknowingly) started this whole affair can now be re-instated, and HUMANIST is off and running once again. As an aside, I'd like to mention that Wisconsin, a major gateway to ARPAnet will become extinct sometime in December. One or more replacements are in the works at this time. Since all of these new sites have the potential to use different software packages, I would not be surprised at another network burp occurring after the change-over. Whether or not this hypothetical burp hits HUMANIST remains to be seen. But, I feel a warning may be in order this time. So, if you've been holding back submissions to the list, hold back no longer. It is now safe to step forward into the fray. Murphy's Law says that I will eat these words. :-) Thanks again for your patience. Steve From: CSHUNTER@UOGUELPH Subject: Date: 16 November 1987, 12:35:13 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 433 (433) The following may be of interest to members of HUMANIST: 1987 RESEARCH CHALLENGES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY VISUAL DATA REPRESENTATIONS: COPING WITH OVERLOAD AND IMPROVING OUR INSIGHT sponsored by University of Toronto/University of Waterloo Cooperative on Information Technology Friday, November 27, 1987 @ Siegfried Hall, St. Jerome's College, U of W Schedule of Activities * Paul Eagles, UW Recreation ``Graphical Representation of Breeding Bird Data: The Bird Atlas'' * Colin Ware, UNB Computer Science ``Colour Sequences for Univariate Maps'' * Howard Armitage and Efrim Boritz, UW School of Accounting ``Teaching Visual Representations to Undergraduates'' * Bruno Forte, UW Applied Mathematics ``Thresholding Grey-Level Histograms by Minimum Information Loss'' * John Moore, UW Management Sciences ``Instruction for Team Sports: The Electronic Playbook'' *Phillipe Martin, UT Experimental Phonetics Laboratory ``Intonation Display for Research and Teaching'' *Gordon Andrews and Peter Myshok, UW Mechanical Engineering ``Visual Data Representations in Engineering Design'' * Peter Wood, UT Computer Systems Research Institute ``Asking Questions About Graphs: A Visual Query Language'' *David H. Farrar and John J. Irwin, UT Chemistry ``Visual Representations for Understanding Chemical Models'' * Philip Robertson, UT Computer Science ``Colour Surface Representation of Images'' * Martin Lamb and David Smith, UT Faculty of Library & Information Sciences ``Visual Representation of a Chemical Database for Teaching Purposes'' * Alan Mitchell, Information Services, City of Toronto ``Improving City Planning and Development Using Computing Graphics: The City of Toronto's Challenge'' * John Danahy, UT Landscape Architecture ``Computer Displays in Architecture'' * Ron Baecker, UT Computer Science ``Visual Representations of Computer Programs'' FEES (Lunch included): Members of the Cooperative on Information Technology Affiliates and Subscribers $45.00 Non-Members $75.00 Students $15.00 If you will require transportation to and from Waterloo -- Bus fare $15.00 Cheques should be made payable to either the University of Toronto, c/o Judy Borodin, 140 St. George Street, Room 622, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 or cheques made payable to the University of Waterloo, c/o Bonnie J. Kent, Sociology Dept., PAS 2061, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 From: JACKA@PENNDRLS Subject: Date: Monday, 16 November 1987 1244-EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 434 (434) The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) and the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce a Summer Institute on Computer Applications in the Humanities. The Institute will be from 18 July 1988 to 26 August at the University of Leuven in Belgium. The following courses will be taught both for undergraduate and graduate credit. A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES (John Hughes) COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN THE HUMANITIES (John R. Abercrombie) TEXTUAL ANALYSIS (John Fought) INTRODUCTION TO THE OXFORD CONCORDANCE PROGRAM FOR RESEARCH (Susan Hockey) STYLISTIC ANALYSIS (Nicole Delbecque) COMPUTERS AND TRANSLATION (Frank Van Enyde) In addition to the full-time faculty, guest speaker from other European and American institutions will give special presentations. For general information on the Institute and/or an application, write to: Peter Steiner, Chairman Comparative Literature Department 420 Williams Hall University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA Electronic Address : Steiner @ PENNDRLN John R. Abercrombie, Assistant Dean for Computing (Humanities) University of Pennsylvania From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 17 November 1987, 00:22:54 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 435 (435) Please excuse this brief test. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: No more junk mail -- unless you object (35 lines) Date: 17 November 1987, 00:26:52 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 436 (436) Dear Colleagues: A few of you have kindly written to me, telling me not to worry so much about the occasional floods of junk mail, that the value of HUMANIST offsets these accidents. I very much appreciate such support for HUMANIST, but I am not persuaded that the obnoxious floods do not upset many. So, I have finally decided to take on the job of filtering out the junk by having ListServ send me all messages intended for HUMANIST. I will then pass on the ones of human origin to ListServ for distribution to all of you. This is not much work, but it has the disadvantage of making the contributions slightly less immediate. From now on, when you send a message to HUMANIST you will receive a note from ListServ telling you that your message has been submitted to me. I'll pass it on within the day. I promise not to censor any human contribution, only the non-human obscenities. If anyone has any comments about the change of procedure, I'd be happy to receive them directly. If you want the old ways back, please say so. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASDr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 YOUNG at UTOREPAS Subject: Forwarded from the Editor Date: 17 November 1987, 15:23:52 EST17 November 1987, 12:31:18 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 437 (437) [this message is roughly 35 ll, exclusive of the header lines] I append the following paragraph from the latest issue of The EDAM Newsletter (10.1, Fall 1987), p 7 Data Bank at Rutgers University A Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank at Rutgers University will provide access to numeric data, including currency, price, and wage information, from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Data Bank was established in 1982 by Professors Rudolph Bell and Martha Howell of the History Department at Rutgers in conjunction with Peter Spufford of Queen's [sic] College Cambridge. Dr Spufford's contribution of 20,000 entries, originally on index cards, has been described as the "cornerstone of the Data Bank," but much additional information is being entered into the computer as work progresses on indexing data derived from continental European archives in order to produce a major resource for scholars. The goal is to have the Data Bank functioning within two years. This is fascinating!! But it tells me almost none of the things I want to know. Are there any HUMANISTs who've heard about this before & who have more detailed information? I assume the original 20K of index cards was from British archives. Is all the data from previously unpublished archival sources? Are prices for the same commodities reported at each period for each region? How will it be accessed? Will it (I hope) be on-line? If there is anyone out there with more information or titles of descriptive articles, etc, please let me know, and I'll post a summary to HUMANIST as appropriate. Thank you. Abigail Young young@UTOREPAS From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASProf. Choueka Yaacov Subject: List of Institutes in CHUM Date: 17 November 1987, 15:45:04 ESTTue, 17 Nov 87 17:01:37 +0200 X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 438 (438) I am trying to compile a list of all Centers/Institutes/Groups, etc., that are involved with Computing in the Humanities, natural language processing, computational linguistics or information retrieval, and are associated with universities or research institutions in general. The list is intended mainly for contact and mailing purposes; it will be made available to anyone who requests it once it'll have reasonable coverage. If you are in charge of such an institution, or just work there or even just happen to know about it, please send the pertinent information in the following format: Name of Institution Full Address Tel Person in Charge Title Tel E-mail address. Thanks for your help! Yaacov Choueka, Institute for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel; choueka@bimacs From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: HUMANIST's logs Date: 17 November 1987, 20:14:15 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 439 (439) Through an oversight HUMANIST's logbooks have until now not been accessible to members of the group. That fault has been corrected. You may recall that ListServ keeps monthly logbooks on the UTORONTO machine of all messages sent out by HUMANIST. These logbooks are named HUMANIST LOGyymm, where yy = the year and mm = the month. Thus the logbook for October is HUMANIST LOG8710. See your copy of the guidebook to HUMANIST for instructions on how to fetch the logs. Yours, W.M. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASDr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 YOUNG at UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 20 November 1987, 14:48:21 EST20 November 1987, 11:15:22 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 440 (440) [message approx. 56 lines long w/o headings & counting this line] Having recently returned from this year's conference at the Waterloo (Ont) Centre for the New OED (topic: large text data-bases), I've been mulling over various details, theories, arguments, etc, which came up in the two days of the conference. One thing which was of great interest was the tentativeness which seemed to me to be apparent about the use of CD-ROM for distributing and using large text-bases. Publishers seemed a) reluctant to enter the marketplace with reference material on CD-ROM, because they felt (based on market research) that there was not a large enough demand (except perhaps among institutional users, such as gov't departments or university libraries); b) curious about what effect the new IBM WORM drive would have; c) worried about the need to provide new software and new formats for data to make it really useable in electronic form (that is, publishers seem very aware that electronically publishing a book is not so simple as to write the text on a CD-ROM and sell it -- that seems to have been one idea which emerged strongly from both the publishers' and the users' point of view during work on the New OED). And the users' community (or at least that part of it represented in Waterloo) seemed to be a bit ambivalent: they wanted CD-ROMs because they could be used on micro's rather than mainframes, and because they offered security and permanence which mag tape doesn't have. But they wanted the textbases on those CD-ROMs to be structured differently from the text in the published reference works, and they wanted software based on the new structuring to be provided for information retrieval, etc, and they expected the CD-ROMs to be cheap: they didn't seem to want to hear from the publishers that that latter goal was disconsonant with the first two, unless there was a huge demand for the finished product. One former publisher summed it up rather well by saying that what the industry (publishing) was waiting for was an electronic best-seller, something with a broad enough appeal to individual users to cause them to go out and buy CD-ROM readers and whose particular usefulness and accessibility was enhanced by the electronic medium in a way that no conventional medium could approach. I was very interested by all this, and I think I've summarized fairly the kinds of attitudes being expressed. Many people, while not doubting the value of CD-ROM for long term data storage, doubted its value for day-to-day use, and everyone seemed to be waiting with great interest to see what would happen with MicroSoft's CD-ROM of Webster's, Roget, and three other standard reference works. I'm curious to know what other people think about all this. Are there HUMANISTs out there waiting with baited breath for the publication of the OED on CD-ROM? Do people want and need textbases on CD-ROM rather than mag tapes? What do you think? Abigail Young Research Assistant, REED YOUNG at UTOREPAS From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASJohn Bradley Subject: Sanskrit Word Processor needed Date: 20 November 1987, 19:01:51 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 441 (441) I'd appreciate a little information: I've been talking to someone here at U of T who wishes to produce a document with Western European language text mixed with Sanskrit (written with the Davanagari script). I believe they want Telugu and Tamil as well. They will be using an IBM PC. Does anyone out there have a happy experience with any software and hardware for an IBM PC that will support this? We haven't been able to lay our hands on a definitive list of languages and character sets that Nota Bene will be supporting. What other choices are there? I'd appreciate a reply directed to me, but will summarize for HUMANIST, if there is general interest. Thanks. ... John Bradley (U of Toronto Computing Service Netnorth/Bitnet: BRADLEY at UTORONTO. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASARCHIVE@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: query on political manifestos Date: 20 November 1987, 19:03:16 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 442 (442) Does anyone have machinereadable versions of any of the political manifestos produced by major British political parties since 1964? If so, please get in touch with ARCHIVE @ UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX Lou Burnard -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor's note: for those of you on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN (and perhaps others) that e-mail address should read ARCHIVE@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS"John J Hughes" Subject: Bits, Bytes, & Biblical Studies (24 lines) Date: 20 November 1987, 21:23:16 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 443 (443) I received a call from Zondervan Publishing House yesterday, informing me that my book BITS, BYTES, & BIBLICAL STUDIES: A REESOURCE GUIDE FOR THE USE OF COMPUTERS IN BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL STUDIES is now available, though I have not yet received a copy. HUMANISTS may be interested to learn that it is (finally!) available. The book may be ordered from me c/o Bits & Bytes Computer Resources, 623 Iowa Ave., Whitefish, MT 59937 for $29.95 + $2.50 shipping and handling or from the publisher. Review copies may be ordered from the publisher. Contact Ed van der Maas, Zondervan Publishing House, 1415 Lake Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506; (800) 233-3480 or (616) 698-6900, (616) 698-3461. The book is 650 pages, including glossary and indices. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASCAMERON@EXETER.AC.UK Subject: From Valois to Bourbon Date: 21 November 1987, 16:12:07 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 444 (444) UNIVERSITY OF EXETER FROM VALOIS TO BOURBON December 14-16 1988. First Announcement To coincide with the quatercentenary of the Blois assassination of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise, which in turn prompted the assassination of Henri de Valois, a residential Conference/Colloquium has been arranged for December 1988 at the University of Exeter. Discussions on a wide variety of topics dealing with the closing months of Henri's reign will be stimulated by papers from Joseph Bergin (Manchester), Richard Bonney (Leicester), Denis Crouzet (Paris), Mark Greengrass (Sheffield) and Robert Knecht (Birmingham). It is estimated that the cost for full board, from 6.00p.m. on Wednesday 14 December to 4.00 p.m. on Friday December 16 will be 60 pounds and the Conference Fee 15 pounds. Pro-rata rates are available on request. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, WRITE TO : Sarah Moore, Dept of French and Italian, Queen's Building, The University, EXETER, EX4 4QH, (UK). Or CAMERON@UK.AC.EXETER From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 445 (445) Four humanities departments at the Univ. of Alberta, Canada (English, Philosophy, Classics, and Religious Studies) have established a committee to investigate the possibility of a joint computer lab for faculty and graduate student research use. The five person committee has a small budget and one year to ascertain the needs and desires of those persons for whom the lab is intended, to view established labs at certain other institutions, and to draft a formal proposal for funding under a provincial government special initiatives program. If the proposal is approved by the cabinet of the Alberta government, the committee's budget will be renewed for a further twelve months during which time the proposal would be implemented and the lab established. The committee would welcome any suggestions or news of particular successes and difficulties which others may have encountered while setting up similar facilities. Comments or queries may be sent to the committee through SREIMER@UALTAVM.BITNET. Stephen R. Reimer Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASKRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: CD-ROM, WORM, etc. Date: 23 November 1987, 12:19:34 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 446 (446) Abagail Young's instructive report on the Waterloo discussions, and her inquiry about our attitudes, provide a good opportunity to update HUMANISTs about the activities of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT), in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), as well as others, on such matters. Some TLG ancient Greek materials have been available on CD-ROM for two years, in two different forms, and have now been supplemented and updated in a new release. Persons with access to the IBYCUS Scholarly Computer (SC) system, which is set up to read CD-ROMs in the TLG format, will know how valuable this type of material is with the right hardware and software. The earlier TLG CD-ROM materials also appeared in an indexed version for accessing through programs developed at Brown (Paul Kahn) and Harvard (Gregory Crane), with impressive results, although I do not have any first hand experience with this approach. The most recent TLG CD-ROM (version "C") is set up in the provisional "High Sierra" format released last year, and it is the intention of TLG-PHI-CCAT to be "High Sierra" compatible in future releases with the hope that standard CD-ROM software can be used to access these texts from a variety of machines. CCAT is also developing software for the IBM-type machines to work with the TLG CD-ROM and the forthcoming CCAT-PHI CD-ROM. Thus far, CCAT has tried to obtain software from other sources that would work on the new TLG CD-ROM on the IBMs, but has not found such (it is still early). Meanwhile, CCAT and PHI are producing a CD-ROM of biblical and Latin materials, plus a wide sampling of other material from various sources, to encourage researchers to test this medium of data circulation. This CD-ROM should be available at very modest cost by the end of next month (December). This disk will be compatible with the new TLG disk, and thus will run immediately on the IBYCUS SC (with updated software). As CCAT and other developers produce software, these disks will be accessible on other hardware as well. CCAT will also put some of the texts on WORM disks to test that approach. Further details will be forthcoming, probably in December. Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASJohn Bradley Subject: Followup on Sanskrit WP Date: 23 November 1987, 14:17:46 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 447 (447) I have already received several responses to my question about a word processor for Sanskrit (Devanagari). Thanks very much to all! Two correspondent suggested the Graphics Toolbox developed at Penn by Jack Abercrombie. However, one of the two warned that when he had looked at it it used only a "lowest- common-denominator" CGA display so the quality of the display was not as good as he'd like, with a rather basic editor. The same correspondent discussed some work that had been done at Another correspondent pointed out that Multilingual Scribe offered Devanagari (but not Tamil). Two other people suggested two pieces of software: one by a firm called LEABUS Ltd (114 Brandon St. London SE17 1AL tel: 01-708-2756), and the other by Gamma Productions Ltd, 609-710 Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90401 USA (213)394-8622. Another individual pointed me at James Nye's article entitled "Indic Fonts for Computer Printers" (in South Asian Library Notes and Queries 18 (Sprint 1985)). Several people remarked that the Macintosh was a more natural machine for this type of work. I agree -- but our client here already has an IBM PC and wishes to use it for this work. Of the people who have responded, none seemed to have used the software they were describing -- they were (kindly) passing on what they had heard. Other people gave me a couple of other interesting leads. After I have investigated them further, I'll post another note. Thanks again to all who replied. .... John Bradley (bitnet: BRADLEY@UTORONTO) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASCMI011@IBM.SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK Subject: Browsing programs Date: 23 November 1987, 15:00:07 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 448 (448) A quick note to thank people who sent me material about browsing programs; I will try and write a summary for HUMANIST, but this is just a 'rain check' until I sort out my mail backlog (not to mention a test of my new mailing program..) sebastian rahtz. computer science, southampton, uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASChuck Bush Subject: A software review (131 lines) Date: 24 November 1987, 20:37:09 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 449 (449) Sonar, A Text Retrieval System for the Macintosh We Macintosh users rarely envy our PC colleagues (and even more rarely admit it). There is only one PC program that makes me step out of my comfortable Macintosh mouse-fur slippers onto the cold tile floor of the PC Program Information: SONAR Text Retrieval System Virginia Systems Software Services, Inc. 5509 West Bay Court Midlothian, Virginia 23113 804-739-3200 Version Reviewed: 4.0 Minimum System: Macintosh Plus, works on SE and Mac II Copy protection: none Suggested price: $195 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASGW2@vaxa.york.ac.uk Subject: OED ON-LINE Date: 24 November 1987, 20:45:30 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 450 (450) Does anyone have advance details of the forthcoming computerised OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY? I'd be interested in both the hardware requirements and the software specifications. Geoffrey Wall From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASJACKA@PENNDRLS Subject: The Graphics Library (63 lines) Date: 25 November 1987, 14:18:53 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 451 (451) The Center for Computer Analysis of Texts is pleased to announce the availability of our Graphics library for EGA, CGA and Hercules displays. We are willing to provide interested colleagues with the essential routines to display foreign fonts on these adapters. In addition, we will provide you with the following initial fonts: Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Phonetics, Punic, and Roman. The routines are written in Turbo Pascal and Assembler. We will send you a demonstration program with including source code. If you are interested in adding this facility to already written programs or new ones, you will have to agree to the following conditions: 1. Not to redistribute the demo disk to others. Other colleagues may receive copies from the Center. 2. To give appropriate scholarly recognition to the Center and its staff for this work. 3. To share any developments or resulting programs with the University of Pennsylvania at no cost and under University License Agreement. If you agree to all these conditions, we will provide you with the full library and additional documentation. We will coordinate updates and share with you any and all improvements.i In addition, we have an opportunity to organize a small workshop on Graphics display if there is sufficient interest. SELECTED LIST OF ROUTINES IN THE FULL LIBRARY: Window management Pop-up menus Microsoft mouse support TIFF support HPLaserJet interfaces Graphics display Selected application program for graphics support The cost of obtaining a demo disk will be $20. This nominal charge covers shipping and handling of the diskette only. JACK ABERCROMBIE ASSISTANT DEAN FOR COMPUTING, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF TEXTS, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA JACKA @ PENNDRLS Center address: CCAT Box 36 College Hall Philadelphia, PA 19104 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASKRAFT@PENNDRLN Subject: CD-ROM for IBM update Date: 25 November 1987, 14:21:15 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 452 (452) As an addendum to my earlier note about Abagail Young's query, CCAT has now received a copy of the MicroSoft DOS extension to permit the CD-ROM reader to be accessed as though it were just another disk drive on the IBM machine. We have been successful in reading the new TLG CD-ROM in this manner, which bodes well for future software development on such large bodies of material. Our present configuration is as follows: Sony CD-ROM reader with interface/controller card for IBM PC, Device Driver for the IBM (from Sony or from Discovery Systems), MS DOS extension licensed for $10 per drive through Discovery Systems, 7001 Discovery Blvd, Dublin OHIO 43017 (tel 614-761-2000). [There are other vendors similarly licensed, I am sure. Discovery Systems was most convenient for us.] Now, with the proof that the new TLG CD-ROM format can be accessed with off the shelf products, CCAT will focus on the search and retrieval software to increase efficiency on the DOS machines, and on quality control of data to be included on CCAT CD-ROM productions. Some of the current developments will be displayed at the combined annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature and American Schools of Oriental Research in Boston on 5-8 December 1987. Cooperation and other sorts of input are encouraged. Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASROBERT E. SINKEWICZ (416) 926-7128 ROBERTS at UTOREPAS Subject: The Greek Index Project Date: 25 November 1987, 15:24:54 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 453 (453) [This submission contains 73 lines] From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 454 (454) THE GREEK INDEX PROJECT OF THE PONTIFICAL INSTITUTE OF MEDIAEVAL STUDIES The Greek Index Project has been designed as an information access system for Greek manuscripts containing works written prior to A.D. 1600. The project was initiated in 1971 by Walter Hayes and has been directed by Robert Sinkewicz since 1985. It is owned and housed by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. The data assembled by the project have been taken primarily from printed catalogues of Greek manuscript collections. For this purpose a microfilm collection of such catalogues was put together with the assistance of other research institutes. Over a period of fifteen years the data were extracted from these sources and arranged in an organized retrieval system. Because of the incomplete nature of many catalogues further research was done to identify entries for many authors or works. The system contains four primary files: an inventory of manuscripts with basic information on each one, an inventory of authors and another for works, and finally a file that provides manuscript listings for each authored work. Anonymous works are treated separately because of the special problems associated with this area. The computerized section of the project is stored in an SQL database on an IBM 4361 mainframe operating under VM/CMS. Special data entry panels have been written to help assure accuracy and speed of data input. A set of utilities has also been written to allow a two-way transfer of data between dBase III PLUS and SQL. This enables us to use micros for data entry and correction in addition to offering collaborators at other sites to share our data in an electronic format. By September 1988 the entire manuscript inventory will be computerized (approximately 100,000 records). In addition, the author, title and manuscript listing files will be available for the Late Byzantine Period (1261-1453), at least for the authors listed in the first eight fascicules of the "Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit." In the fall of 1988 we will be ready to publish a first edition of the "Manuscript Listings for the Authored Works of the Palaeologan Period." A second edition will be published when the "PLP" is completed. A "Studia Minora" series is also planned. This will be a series of shorter publications (30-40 pages each) devoted to individual authors of special interest or other minor research tools that we have assembled, such as a handlist of Greek manuscripts from the Phillipps collection. Two to five issues will be published each year for the next four years. If funding of the project is continued, the remaining data for the earlier periods will be computerized over the next four years. In the meantime data on authors and works for those periods is being provided to students and scholars for the cost of the data entry of the information requested ($15 per hour). The Greek Index Project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Support for our hardware and software installation has been provided by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the University of Toronto through a cooperative agreement with IBM Canada. Submitted by Robert E. Sinkewicz Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 59 Queen's Park Crescent East Toronto, Ontario CANADA M5S 2C4 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASJohn J. Hughes Subject: Electronic OED (12 lines) Date: 25 November 1987, 19:22:11 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 455 (455) Some HUMANIST (whose name I have lost) recently inquired about the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. According to a report in the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (November 18, 1987, p. B60), Oxford University Press is putting all 22,000 pages and 500,000 definitions of the 16-volume OED on three CD-ROMs. The first two ROMs will contain the basic 12 volumes and should be available by the end of 1987. The four supplementary volumes will be placed on a third ROM, for which no release date was given. A new printed edition of the OED that contains 5,000 additional words will be published "early in 1989." A complete revision of the entire work is planned for 1990. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Job posting (61 lines) Date: 25 November 1987, 19:38:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 456 (456) FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES ...........LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE PROG ANTICIPATED VACANCY: Instructor or Assistant Professor of British Literature, starting September 1, 1988. A renewable, full time position. DUTIES INCLUDE: teach undergraduate courses in Brit. Lit., Intro. to Literature, Communications, and General Education. Teaching load is 24 semester hours per year, typically five 4-hour courses plus tutorials and/or independent studies or six 4-hour courses. RANK AND SALARY: Salary range is $20,173 - $23,819 for Instructor and $25,178 - $28,956 for Assist. Prof. plus state mandated fringe benefits. Salary negotiable depending on qualifications and experience. THE FACULTY: Arts and Humanities has 33 regular faculty members and degree programs in Studies in the Arts, Historical Studies, Literature and Language, Philosophy and Religion. STOCKTON STATE COLLEGE IS AN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION/EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. WOMEN AND MINORITIES ARE ENCOURAGED TO APPLY. Send letter of application with resume to: Margaret Marsh Chair, Faculty of Arts and Humanities Stockton State College Pomona, N.J. 08240 ******************************************************************* Of particular interest to HUMANIST participants is the fact that we are attempting to start an undergraduate degree track in electronic publishing within the Literature and Language Program. The person appointed to this position will be able to develop this curriculum and establish an electronic publishing lab. So far, our search has not produced many humanists with computing backgrounds and skills. Ken Tompkins -- Stockton State From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Information Retrieval List (90 lines) Date: 26 November 1987, 16:42:57 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 457 (457) Dear Colleagues: The following is a description of another electronic discussion group, IRList, which may be of interest to some of you. Subscription is obtained by sending a note to the moderator, Ed Fox, at one of the several e-mail addresses listed below. Yours, W.M. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- IRList is open to discussion of any topic (vaguely) related to information retrieval. Certainly, any material relating to ACM SIGIR (the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing Machinery) is of interest. Our field has close ties to artificial intelligence, database management, information and library science, linguistics, ... A partial list of topics suitable are: Information Management/Processing/Science/Technology AI Applications to IR Hardware aids for IR Abstracting Hypertext and Hypermedia CD-ROM / CD-I / ... Indexing/Classification Citations Information Display/Presentation Cognitive Psychology Information Retrieval Applications Communications Networks Information Theory Computational Linguistics Knowledge Representation Computer Science Language Understanding Cybernetics Library Science Data Abstraction Message Handling Dictionary analysis Natural Languages, NL Processing Document Representations Optical disc technology and applications Electronic Books Pattern Recognition, Matching Evidential Reasoning Probabilistic Techniques Expert Systems in IR Speech Analysis Expert Systems use of IR Statistical Techniques Full-Text Retrieval Thesaurus construction Fuzzy Set Theory Contributions may be anything from tutorials to rampant speculation. In particular, the following are sought: Abstracts of Papers,Reports,Dissertations Address Changes Bibliographies Conference Reports Descriptions of Projects/Laboratories Half-Baked Ideas Histories Humorous,Enlightening Anecdotes Questions Requests Research Overviews Seminar Announcements/Summaries Work Planned or in Progress You may submit material for the digest to a variety of places, depending on what network you are on and how quickly and reliably you want mail to reach me. We do not have to pay for mail deliveries, but they do vary in speediness and reliability. Possibilities include: If on ARPANET and can use domains, or on CSNET, use fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu fox@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu If on ARPANET and can't use domains use one of the following fox%vtopus.cs.vt.edu@csnet-relay.arpa fox%vtcs1.cs.vt.edu@csnet-relay.arpa fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa If on BITNET, use fox@vtcs1 or foxea@vtvax3 If on UUCPNET, use something like one of the following ... seismo!vtcs1.bitnet!fox ... seismo!vtvax3.bitnet!foxea As you might expect, archival copies of all digests will be kept; feel free to ask for recent back issues. Note that FTP is not yet possible, so all communication must be by EMAIL or phone or letter. The list does not assume copyright, nor does it accept any liability arising from remailing of submitted material. Further, no liability is accepted for use of such materials for information retrieval research, including distribution of test collections. I reserve the right, however, to refuse to remail any contribution that I judge to be of commercial purpose, obscene, libelous, irrelevant, or pointless. Replies to public requests for information should be sent, at least in "carbon" form, to this list unless the request states otherwise. If necessary, I will digest or abstract the replies to control the volume of distributed mail. However, PLEASE DO contribute! I would rather deal with too much material than with too little. -- Ed Fox Edward A. Fox, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech (VPI&SU), McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061 (703) 961-5113 or 6931 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 26 November 1987, 16:55:57 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 458 (458) This is a test. AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZzed. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: News of a new LIST, in 30 lines Date: 26 November 1987, 22:01:39 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 459 (459) There is a new LIST that may interest some readers of HUMANIST and ENGLISH; it is ETHICS-L and you subscribe to it with a SEND (VMS) or TELL (VM) command: TELL LISTSERV@MARIST SUB ETHICS-L Your Name The sender of the news, Jane Robinett (ROBINET@POLYTECH) says: "Discussions of ethics in computing usually generate more heat than light. This list could do a lot toward generating more light if we do more than trade war stories and opinions of the "I'm right and you're NOT" variety. Of course we can't get any work done without some war stories, since they furnish food for thought. But we shouldn't stop there. Given our experiences, we ought to be able to delineate the basic issues and hot areas in computer ethics. Some current ones have to do with: - ownership of information (both data and program files) - responsibility for program failures (Is the company responsible? the programmer? the lead programmer? the project manager?) Who's responsible for the "fix"? - how much privacy is reasonable (there are all kinds of levels here -- data bases, systems, LANs, networks, etc.) "I will be teaching a course (required for all Polytechnic CS majors) next semester which has a heavy ethics component. That's one reason I'm especially interested in this list. "A current topic around here is what happens when systems programs fail? Is anyone responsible for damage done? Or is the responsibility only for the necessary fix?" Regards, M.G. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Bible for the Macintosh Date: 27 November 1987, 13:57:43 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 460 (460) This is just a short inquiry: Does anyone know if the King James version of the Bible is available for the Apple Macintosh? (For both CP/M and MS-DOS systems there was a company that marketed the Bible, plus some sort of searching retrieval program, for under $200 as I recall, though I never had access to a copy). Jim Cerny University Computing, University of N.H., USA. J_CERNY@UNHH From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Two small points of order Date: 28 November 1987, 01:06:47 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 461 (461) Dear Colleagues: First point. Apparently the note from HUMANIST concerning the Ethics list was not entirely clear about how interested souls subscribe. The command "TELL LISTSERV@MARIST..." should not be sent to HUMANIST but to the ListServ program (a pseudo-user) at the MARIST node of Bitnet. Thus, if you're on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN, you send this command directly, not in a note. If you're connected to Bitnet through a gateway (true of HUMANISTs in the UK, for example, who are on JANET) then you need to put this command as the first and only line in a note to ListServ@Marist. Second point. Some time ago we agreed that answers to specific questions asked on HUMANIST should be sent to the questioner directly, not to HUMANIST, and that the questioner would then gather up the replies, edit them if necessary, and post the results to HUMANIST. In this way those of us who have forgotten the original question won't be bothered with several replies out of context, but still the results will be available generally, in one convenient note. (Convenient for filing or deletion, depending on the recipient.) Then, too, asking a question carries with it a certain not altogether insalubrious burden. HUMANIST sometimes reminds me of Heraclitus' stream. For those of you who have hung around in the still pools beside the rushing current and have seen this foot before, please excuse my editorial reminder. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Electronic OED (31 lines) Date: 29 November 1987, 13:05:39 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 462 (462) A few of the details in the recent response from John J. Hughes (based on the report in the Chronical of Higher Education) might mislead those who are interested in the future of the OED. The form of the release of the integrated OED (i.e., 1928 version plus 4-volume Supplement plus new materials) is so far undecided. The following information might clarify the situation: There is planned to be a release of the OED (1928 version only) on CD-ROM around year-end. This comes with its own software for interactive access, and reqires an IBM PC with a CD player (any of four (I think) CD-Rom makes). The data is split across 2 CD-ROM disks. None of the materials from the 4-volume Supplement will be available in this form. There is also a possibility that OUP will release a version of the data on tape, using SGML-like tags. Software to browse and extract data will likely also be provided, allowing users to access the OED efficiently from conventional disks, either interactively or via programs. This version will likely not be ready until mid-88. Software will likely be provided for VM/CMS and UNIX, and perhaps for PCs as well. Again, none of the materials from the 4-volume Supplement will be available in this form. Finally the full OED, integrated with the Supplements and with new materials, will not be available until 1989. The first release will be in book form, with an electronic version sometime later. At this stage, the hardware and software requirements are not yet decided. Frank Tompa, Co-Director of the Waterloo Centre for the New OED From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: How to answer questions, again Date: 29 November 1987, 14:23:42 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 463 (463) Dear Colleagues: Jim Cerny of Brown University (JAZBO@BROWNVM) sent the following to me in response to my recent point about the answering of ques- tions on HUMANIST. I reminded the membership that we had agreed to answer specific questions by responding to the questioner directly, not to HUMANIST, and as questioners to gather up the replies, edit them if necessary, and post the results to HUMANIST. I originally suggested this convention because I thought HUMANISTs would be annoyed at being sent replies to ques- tions they couldn't remember and which usually didn't concern them in any event. Cerny's challenging of the convention gives us the opportunity to rethink what we want to do. Here is most of what he said: ----------------------------------------------------------------- I understand the motivation for this editorial approach, but I would like to point out that shared iterative refinement of a question is typical both of group conferencing, including face- to-face interaction as well as telephony and most bulletin boards. For example, I just discovered a bug in the Microsoft QuickC compiler. The typical response of participants in the Microsoft conference (on BIX) is to suggest solutions, often in the framework of "have you tried X". These responses could be mailed to me instead of being posted in the conference, but they have public value. Often, these "responsive" questions contain errors that neither the original "speaker" nor the responder can correct. Or, even if the original "speaker" can correct them, it takes the voice of the multitude to convince. In addition, some of the most productive responses can be the most trivial in content, as various participants temporarily take up the burden of moderating. "Say more." "What do you mean by this?" It may be little more than assurance that others are interested and listening, confirmation that the original posting, which may have been in large part testing the waters anyway---that the original posting was appropriate and that the author should let out the stops.... I have been participating in electronic conferences for three or four years now, including BIX, CompuServe, and various bul- letin boards around the country. In my judgment, the current approach threatens to stifle discourse. In order for brief splinter discussions to form, everyone who might be interested would have to contact the original poster and request to be added to an ad hoc list, which may have value for no more than a few days and a few mailings anyway. Also, can we realisti- cally expect every HUMANIST to be prepared to take on the role of moderator and list server for a few days? The face-to-face analogue, I guess, would be the act of a few people stepping aside to hash out something that the group finds uninteresting. Or, might it just as well be the perking up of a few ears to see if anything interesting IS being said? or to see if one has anything to add to the conversation that seems to be develop- ing? How is this dynamism to occur if one immediately shunts aside all of the conversational shit work (as some feminists have so aptly put it)? Our goal, I believe, is, in part, to share information and, in part, to find out what information none of us have---to identify areas that need research or questions that one of us might be able to answer in a couple of months. Even such rela- tively pure information motives, however, cannot be well served by restricting group communication to the obviously information giving. Well, there it is. I believe that people should develop scan and delete skills instead of squelching discourse. ----------------------------------------------------------------- If you care at all about this, would you please let us know what you think and why? Thanks for your help. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: An error Date: 29 November 1987, 14:27:49 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 464 (464) In my previous note I mistakenly said that Jim Cerny is from Brown University. He's actually from the Univ. of New Hampshire. His correct e-mail address is JAZBO@UNHH. My apologies! From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Compuserve Date: 29 November 1987, 19:27:39 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 465 (465) Can anyone advise me on the cheapest way of logging on to the US bbs "Compuserve" from my hometown of Winnipeg? When I lived in Vancouver, BC, a Compuserve gateway city, I had only to pay Compuserve's own extortionate costs; now it seems, I must also pay for longdistance costs, or a Datapac surcharge. Is there no way around this? From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: 1st edn. of the OED in CD-ROM and 2nd edn. in hardcopy Date: 30 November 1987, 10:54:07 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 466 (466) I have received the following information from Tim Benbow of Oxford University Press about its publishing plans for the OED, in response to the query from Mr Wall. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Oxford University Press has announced that early in 1988 it will publish the original Oxford English Dictionary, 1884-1928, issued in twelve printed volumes, on two CD ROM disks. OUP states that this product is very user-friendly, much more so than other similar products on the market. These CD ROMs can run on a PC, XT or AT or an IBM clone with a 640 K memory with either a CGA or EGA device. A Hitachi, Philips, or Sony disk drive is required. The display monitor may be monochrome, but a colour monitor is preferable, as colour is used to distinguish different types of information. OUP also plan to make the original OED available on magnetic tape in a fully structured version with embedded codes, written in IBM format. In 1989, OUP will publish the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, which is the text of the original OED, plus supplements, plus new material which has been added recently. This will be published in a printed version of 20 volumes. The database containing this material will be made available in a number of electronic forms. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS"Kenneth R. van Wyk" Subject: A serious warningVirus warning! Date: 30 November 1987, 15:29:05 ESTMon, 23 Nov 87 08:05:57 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 467 (467) I SEND THE FOLLOWING ALONG IN THE INTEREST OF STOPPING THE SPREAD OF THIS PARTICULAR PROBLEM. LET ME REPEAT: ********* THIS IS NOT REPEAT NOT A JOKE ********* The following note was distributed in the network warning of a very serious problem which can infect a site which is obtaining Public Domain software for unknown sources, especially over the network. There have been other reports of this (or similar) problem from other sites and the effects are most devistating, especially for novice users of hard-disks who don't truly understand the need for backups! Please warn others who pick up strange Public Domain stuff. (There is at least one report of a virus in a program on a BBS!) Last week, some of our student consultants discovered a virus program that's been spreading rapidly throughout Lehigh University. I thought I'd take a few minutes and warn as many of you as possible about this program since it has the chance of spreading much farther than just our University. We have no idea where the virus started, but some users have told me that other universities have recently had similar probems. The virus: the virus itself is contained within the stack space of COMMAND.COM. When a pc is booted from an infected disk, all a user need do to spread the virus is to access another disk via TYPE, COPY, DIR, etc. If the other disk contains COMMAND.COM, the virus code is copied to the other disk. Then, a counter is incremented on the parent. When this counter reaches a value of 4, any and every disk in the PC is erased thoroughly. The boot tracks are nulled, as are the FAT tables, etc. All Norton's horses couldn't put it back together again... :-) This affects both floppy and hard disks. Meanwhile, the four children that were created go on to tell four friends, and then they tell four friends, and so on, and so on. I urge anyone who comes in contact with publicly accessible (sp?) disks to periodically check their own disks. Also, exercise safe computing - always wear a write protect tab. :-) This is not a joke. A large percentage of our public site disks has been gonged by this virus in the last couple days. Kenneth R. van Wyk User Services Senior Consultant Lehigh University Computing Center (215)-758-4988 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPASLOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: an interesting problem Date: 30 November 1987, 15:35:18 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 468 (468) Here's an interesting problem someone may have an answer to: what's the best way of automatically detecting the language in which something is written? We have a library here in Oxford with a large (well, very large actually) catalogue of book titles in just about every european language you can think Lou Burnard From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: range of discussion on HUMANIST Date: 1 December 1987, 00:21:22 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 469 (469) I appreciate the concern about HUMANIST's self-editorial policy. There is a spirit missing from HUMANIST's discussions that has been present in other discussions I have been a member of. On the other hand, I can remain a member of HUMANIST in good conscience because it does not take much time away from my other duties, which are considered by others here to be of a higher priority. Two specific examples: I was a member of the info-c discussion on ARPA (linked with the sister discussion group on usenet). This was a free-flowing discussion with frequent cries from subscribers asking submitters to control themselves. There was a great deal of redun- dancy and even inanity mixed with a few nuggets of valid and even brilliant discussion. Although I enjoyed it immensely on the whole, I had to quit because I couldn't afford that many hours of extra reading per week. After a while, the returns just weren't great enough to put up with the noise. On the other end of the editorial spectrum was the arpanet RISKS digest. A "digest" means that the moderator is also an editor. All submissions are sent to him, and he exercises editorial judgement on everything submitted. Once or twice a week, as volume dictates, the collected and edited submissions are mailed in one package to all sub- scribers, with a refreshing dash of humour added. The kind of give- and-take conversations that have been referred to can still happen in this environment, because the moderator is essentially benign unless serious redundancies and/or inanities occur. (I believe that the mod- erator was getting full credit for his work in this, and it was proba- bly a part of his job description.) Nevetheless, even so edited, the volume became more than I could deal with effectively (despite the fascinating subject matter, by the way: risks to the public from com- puters and automated systems). So although I find HUMANIST occasionally on the "dead" side, I have no trouble maintaining my subscription since it does not demand too much of my time. Discussions happen in private, and if I want to get in on them I can contact the initiator. I admit, I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more activity in HUMANIST on occasion, and I think people with issues of broad interest (such as the recent discussion on the OED) should feel free to bring these issues forward. But if HUMANIST has to err, I would rather it err on the dead side, lest I be forced to resign. Let my vote be so registered. Sterling Bjorndahl Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont Graduate School Claremont, California From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Dirty Dozen ... Plus??? Date: 1 December 1987, 09:25:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 470 (470) This is just to add to the warning passed on by Stuart Hunter about Lehigh's direct experience with a virus in some publicly obtained copies of COMMAND.COM. There are apparently a number of other programs that have had work done to their genes to turn them into malignant viruses. They have come to be called "The Dirty Dozen," though there are more than a dozen. These have been described in a number of computer center newsletters in the last year or so. The most recent description I've seen was "Beware The Dirty Dozen: Software That Destroys," CAUSE/EFFECT, v. 10, n. 6, November 1987, pp. 44-45. (which is reprinted from the "Technical Update" publication at the Univ. Cincinnati Computing Center, September 1, 1987). Jim Cerny University Computing, Univ. N.H. J_CERNY@UNHH From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Discussions [34 ll, counting this one] Date: 1 December 1987, 09:34:18 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 471 (471) Well, pace Sterling Bjorndahl, I don't find HUMANIST on the dead side and I don't want to! But I think I know exactly what he's talking about. Recently it seems that queries or opinions appear and then die in electronic silence. In fact, there seems in general to be less discussion now than there was a few months ago. I don't know to what to attribute this. It could reflect a need on the part of those of us who teach or provide services to students to prepare for and then deal with the demands of a new academic session. It could be that no-one has very much to say at the moment. But I have wondered recently whether we were all feeling a reluctance to say much brought on by our worthy moderator's urgings towards self-editing (with the consequent responsiblity of editing and posting a resulting conversation, if any) and our new awareness of the cost factor for the Antipodes at least. I certainly find the current "full" discussion on the details about the electronic OED interesting and a nice change, even though I had already found out a lot of it at the Waterloo conference, and I wish that I'd kept my query about the Rutgers database general now too. So I am glad that Willard has passed on what others have had to say, and I think perhaps we should try out for a bit making all discussion general. We could make use of a subject line to indicate the topic of a posting, and whether it were part of an on-going discussion, thus enabling those who need to clear their readers quickly to ignore discussions which were not of interest to them. Abigail Young Research Associate, Records of Early English Drama University of Toronto young at utorepas From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: discussions (15 lines) Date: 1 December 1987, 11:14:50 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 472 (472) I would like to express my approval of the contents of the recent message about discussions on HUMANIST. Although I have no interest in scanning the turgid "flames" of the digitally deranged, it seems much more than unlikely that HUMANISTs will inundate one another with drivel; and, I am content to attempt to follow the threads of the discussions on my own. Certainly it >is< easy enough to dispatch into oblivion (I have set up a macro to just that purpose) any piece of mail in which one has no interest. As it now stands, HUMANIST seems a touch too formal. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD ROMs, micro- and mainframe computing with large corpora Date: 1 December 1987, 14:24:09 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 473 (473) A late contribution to the discussion provoked by Abigail Young about CDs as a medium of data distribution. [60 lines or so.] I think Dr. Young hit the nail on the head with the question "Are there people out there waiting with bated breath for the new OED on CD ROM?" Because certainly if we're not excited about the OED as a group, then we're not as a group going to be very excited about anything. Yes, I AM waiting with bated breath for an electronic OED, but I was far more excited to learn it would be available on tape than I was to hear about the CD ROM version. I like and use my PC, and I hope someday to be able to work with massive textual corpora on it, but at least for the moment I think magnetic tape is a far better medium for distribution. For one thing, I don't have a CD ROM drive, and I don't know anyone who does, except for Bob Kraft and a classicist here who has a Ibycus micro on loan but does her Greek word processing on our mainframe. Tape drives, on the other hand, will be available at any school in the country. For another, tape drives allow me to change the data -- add to it, enhance it, reduce its size -- and make another copy. CD ROM doesn't. For that reason alone, I'll wait for WORM before buying a new drive for my PC. And finally, mainframes seem to me by and large better at dealing with large quantities of data. That is changing, to be sure. But I can edit the Nibelungenlied in storage on the mainframe, and extract every occurrence of the name 'Sivrit' in a couple of seconds. My PC with its 640 Kbytes can only hold a fourth or so of the Nibelungenlied in RAM at a time. To be sure, a micro-Ibycus could also find all the occurrences of 'Sivrit' in a few seconds -- if the Nibelungenlied were on a CD ROM. But it's not, and there aren't enough Germanic philologists in the country to make it economically feasible to make one. Nor do I WANT a frozen, unalterable text of the Nibelungenlied. I want to be able to index it, to add parsing information or scansions to the file so I can search on them, and so on. Not to mention the need to correct typos in the transcription and add manuscript variants. For all this, we need erasable media, not CD ROMs. Magnetic tapes do have the drawback, for some users, that they are typically readable only on mainframes. (There are PC-based 9-track tape drives, but they aren't real common.) And many humanists don't like working on mainframes. Even for those users, however, the local academic computing center should be, and almost always is, in a position to read the tape and help the user download the data to a microcomputer. No, it's not always easy. And no, it's not always fast. A megabyte an hour or so. But the chances are good the academic computer center knows how to do it, and does it regularly. All the ones I've ever known as a user or staff member do. There may be centers that do NOT provide this kind of service, although I have never seen one and never heard of one. But if they exist, those centers should be DRIVEN to provide support for humanities computing, support for microcomputing, and support for data exchange between mainframes and micros. If they are not providing these services, they are not doing their job. Given the kind of support computer centers ought to be providing for humanist users, and given the kind of flexible text humanistic work seems to need, I think CD ROMs look much less promising as a means of data distribution than WORM disks and magnetic tape, and in some cases floppy disks. All of which is just one user's opinion. -Michael Sperberg-McQueen University of Illinois at Chicago (U18189 at UICVM) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Subject line comments (25 lines) Date: 1 December 1987, 14:26:50 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 474 (474) Oh, my, the HUMANIST subject lines may get long. Now, in addition to the honest-to-goodness subject, and to the number of lines in the message, Abigail Young suggests "we could make use of a subject line to indicate the topic of a posting, and whether it were part of an on-going discussion, thus enabling those who need to clear their readers quickly to ignore discussions which were not of interest to them." Maybe we serious, dull writers can use such an augmented subject line as a place to pun? But woe is me for, alas, my mailer does not accept long subject lines. Can it be that some people will have to read the beginning of the message to learn what we want to ignore? Will we be like this lady: Lizzi Borden took an axe And plunged it deep into the VAX Don't you envy people who Do all the things you want to do? (Thanks to Jerry Whitnell in California for the ditty.) Maybe we'll relax a bit as our marking gets frantic and we hear the carols of the season. Marshall Gilliland U of Saskatchewan From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Concordance for Mac Date: 1 December 1987, 15:55:42 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 475 (475) Does anyone know of concordance programs for the Mac? Thanks. --Jim From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding guidelines -- progress report (225 lines) Date: 1 December 1987, 15:58:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 476 (476) A followup on the current status of the ACH effort to formulate guidelines for text encoding practices. ****************************************************************** * NOTE: The following encoding conventions have been used to * * represent French accents throughout this message: * * * * To Represent Accents -- Pour la representation des accents * * / acute accent - accent aigu * * ` grave accent - accent grave * * * * The accent codes are typed Les codes pour les accents se * * AFTER the letter, and are trouvent APRES la lettre qu'ils * * used with both upper and modifient, et s'utilisent avec * * lower case letters. les majuscules aussi bien que * * les minuscules. * ****************************************************************** On November 12 and 13, 1987, 31 representatives of professional societies, universities, and text archives met to consider the possibility of developing a set of guidelines for the encoding of texts for literary, linguistic, and historical research. The meeting was called by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The list of participants is appended to this document. The participants heartily endorsed the idea of developing encoding guidelines. In order to guide such development, they agreed on the following principles: The Preparation of Re/daction des directives Text Encoding Guidelines pour le codage des textes Pougheepsie, New York 13 November 1987 1. The guidelines are intended 1. Le but des directives est de cre/er to provide a standard format un format standard pour l'e/change for data interchange in des donne/es utilise/es pour la humanities research. recherche dans les humanite/s. 2. The guidelines are also 2. Les directives sugge/reront intended to suggest principles e/galement des principes pour for the encoding of texts l'enregistrement des textes in the same format. destine/s a` utiliser ce format. 3. The directives should 3. Les directives devraient a. define a recommended a. de/finir une syntaxe recommande/e syntax for the format pour exprimer le format, b. define a metalanguage b. de/finir un me/ta-langage for the description de/crivant les syste`mes de of text-encoding schemes, codage des textes, c. describe the new format c. de/crire par le moyen de ce and representative me/talangage, aussi bien qu'en existing schemes both in prose, le nouveau syste`me de that metalanguage and codage aussi bien qu'un choix in prose. repre/sentatif de syste`mes de/ja` en vigueur. 4. The guidelines should 4. Les directives devraient proposer propose sets of coding des syste`mes de codage utilisables conventions suited for pour un large e/ventail various applications. d'applications. 5. The guidelines should 5. Sera incluse dans les directives include a minimal set of l'e/nonciation d'un syste`me de conventions for encoding codage minimum, pour guider new texts in the format. l'enregistrement de nouveaux textes conforme/ment au format propose/. 6. The guidelines are to be 6. Le travail d'e/laboration des drafted by committees on: directives sera confie/ a` quatre comite/s centre/s sur les sujets suivants: a. text documentation a. la documentation des textes, b. text representation b. la repre/sentation des textes, c. text interpretation c. l'analyse et l'interpre/tation and analysis des textes d. metalanguage definition d. la de/finition du me/talangage et and description of son utilisation pour de/crire le existing and proposed nouveau syste`me aussi bien que schemes ceux qui existent de/ja`. co-ordinated by a steering Ce travail sera coordonne/ par un committee of representatives comite/ d'organisation ou` of the principal sie`geront des repre/sentants des sponsoring organizations. principales associations qui soutiennent cet effort. 7. Compatibility with existing 7. Dans la mesure du possible, le standards will be maintained nouveau syste`me sera compatible as far as possible. avec les syste`mes de codage existants. 8. A number of large text 8. Des repre/sentants de plusieurs archives have agreed in grandes archives de textes en form principle to support the lisible par machine acceptent en guidelines in their function principe d'utiliser les directives as an interchange format. en tant que description des formats We encourage funding agencies pour l'e/change de leurs donne/es. to support development of Nous encourageons les organismes tools to facilitate this qui fournissent des fonds pour la interchange. recherche de soutenir le de/veloppement de ce qui est ne/cessaire pour faciliter cela. 9. Conversion of existing 9. En convertissant des textes machine-readable texts to lisibles par machine de/ja` the new format involves the existants, on remplacera translation of their automatiquement leur codage actuel conventions into the syntax par ce qui est ne/cessaire pour les of the new format. No rendre conformes au format nouveau. requirements will be made for Nul n'exigera l'ajout the addition of information d'informations qui ne sont pas not already coded in the de/ja` repre/sente/es dans ces texts. textes. (trad. P. A. Fortier) ****************** The further organization and drafting of the guidelines will be supervised by a steering committee selected by the three sponsoring The interchange format defined by the guidelines is expected to be compatible with the Standard Generalized Markup Language defined by ISO 8859, if that proves compatible with the needs of research. The needs of specialized research interests will be addressed wherever it proves possible to find interested groups or individuals to do the necessary work and achieve the necessary consensus. Formation of specific working groups will be announced later; in the meantime, those interested in working on specific problems are invited to contact either Dr. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of Illinois at Chicago (M/C 135), P.O. Box 6998, Chicago IL 60680 (on - N.I., C.M.S-McQ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ List of Participants Helen Aguera, National Endowment for the Humanities Robert A. Amsler, Bell Communications Research David T. Barnard, Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen's University, Ontario Lou Burnard, Oxford Text Archive Roy Byrd, IBM Research Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa David Chestnutt (Assoc. for Documentary Editing, American Historical Assoc.), Department of History, University of South Carolina Yaacov Choueka (Academy of the Hebrew Language), Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University Jacques Dendien, Institut National de la Langue Francaise Paul A. Fortier, Department of Romance Languages, University of Manitoba Thomas Hickey, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Susan Hockey (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), Oxford University Computing Service Nancy M. Ide (Association for Computers and the Humanities), Department of Computer Science, Vassar College Stig Johansson, International Computer Archive of Modern English, University of Oslo Randall Jones (Modern Language Association), Humanities Research Computing Center, Brigham Young University Robert Kraft, Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania Ian Lancashire, Center for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto D. Terence Langendoen (Linguistic Society of America), Graduate Center, City University of New York Charles (Jack) Meyers, National Endowment for the Humanities Junichi Nakamura, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kyoto University Wilhelm Ott, Universitaet Tuebingen Eugenio Picchi, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa Carol Risher (American Association of Publishers), American Association of Publishers, Inc. Jane Rosenberg, National Endowment for the Humanities Jean Schumacher, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes, Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve J. Penny Small (American Philological Association), U.S. Center for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Rutgers University C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of Illinois at Chicago Paul Tombeur, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes, Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium Frank Tompa, New Oxford English Dictionary Project, University of Waterloo Donald E. Walker (Association for Computational Linguistics), Bell Communications Research Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa, Italy [end of message] From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 1 December 1987, 16:22:58 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 477 (477) (Was that too long, Marshall?) Does anyone have any information on WORM drives? A non-HUMANIST colleague told me he had heard about them at an IBM-sponsored conference and that they were the best thing since sliced bread, basically. I've also heard that a disk for an IBM WORM drive would be capable of being written to only once, which would certainly make such a disk only slightly more useful than a CD-ROM, and considerably less useful than a magnetic tape. I am always suspicious of new devices which will revolutionize my life and save me time, trouble, etc. I think it is because I tended to believe the Popular Science/Mechanics picture of the future when I was a child. But a WORM drive & disk capable of multiple disk writes as well as reads sounds very, very appealing. Abigail Ann Young Research Associate, Records of Early English Drama University of Toronto young at utorepas From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Sonar; Mac; concordance vs. retrieval (54 lines) Date: 2 December 1987, 00:17:29 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 478 (478) I asked about concordance programs for the Mac. Someone sent me the review of Sonar and a couple of others have mentioned it. The review does not say anything about concording texts with Sonar, however. I have never used one of these retrieval programs. I have used WatCon and have written a concordance program for the IBM PC (for multiple versions of the same text). IS Sonar appropriate for generating concordances? concordances that will be printed and distributed? Does it properly handle lines of poetry, for instance? and give columns of lines with locations? I assume that WordCruncher from BYU can do such, since it is a descendent of a concording program (unless there is an equivocation on "concord" here, and please let us all know if there is). I am in the process of designing a retrieval engine and browser for the American Heritage Dictionary. When I think of retrieval programs, I think of inverted indices, hash tables, and the like. "Use this information to go find X and then let's Y it." That, to me, is a typical retrieval action, and the access is typically random. Concording, however, at least in the traditional sense, is sequential and exhaustive. One COULD use a retrieval application to concord a text, but it would be very inefficient and would probably require additional programming anyway. One would have to have a means to call the retrieval engine iteratively for every word in the text as well as the means to format and write the results someplace. Are WordCruncher and Sonar dual applications? In order to index, one has to perform much of the same processing as is required for concording (process sequentially and exhaustively, split words out of lines, stop words, lemmatize?, cross reference (See also xxx)?). Well, some of the routines are the same anyway, at least to the extent that the developer of one type of application would have a start on developing the other. It begins to sound like integrated systems a la Symphony vs. 1-2-3. Does the system that offers both really do both jobs well? Or, first I guess, are there systems that offer both? --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM & WORM [88 lines] Date: 2 December 1987, 12:12:08 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 479 (479) The recent observations by Abigail Young and Michael Sperberg-McQueen on CD-ROM and WORM technologies call for some comment from the "pro" (and experienced) side. I hope to keep them brief, just to pinpoint some of the issues. Michael's comments seemed to me to miss many crucial points, and did not reflect the attitudes or situation of numerous people with whom I am in regular contact. 1. The difference between CD-ROM and WORM for this discussion is negligible, as Abigail suspected. Right now, WORM drives are more expensive and less tested publicly, but cheaper to produce a single disk. But once you have that single WORM disk, which currently costs about $65, there is no price advantage to making multiple copies (50 copies would cost $3250). With the CD-ROM, it might cost $3000 to master but each additional copy would cost very little (perhaps $ 7 each for 100). Thus it would be much cheaper to make 100 copies of a CD-ROM than 100 copies of a WORM disk at present. And the CD-ROM holds more than twice as much as the WORM disks with which we are working. So WORM is fine for limited production or in-house purposes, CD-ROM is better for larger distribution, etc. Neither can be changed once they are mastered, although WORM can be mastered in stages, while CD-ROM is a once for all mastering process. 2. Are people anxiously waiting for data distributed on CD-ROM? In my experience, YES. We have many advance orders for the CCAT CD-ROM, and more inquiries. Ted Brunner can report on the TLG experience. What sorts of people are asking? Obviously, IBYCUS SC owners (about 130 machines) who are set up to use CD-ROM as part of the package; Librarians, who need massive amounts of data in a bibliographically controlled context (static is good, in this setting!); the mass of individual scholars/students who are not in a tape-oriented environment such as Michael describes (his experience is not at all typical, even at the ideal level, of the majority of people with whom I am in contact -- people in small colleges, seminaries, or operating individually, with no access to a real mainframe or effective consultation). 3. What is attractive to these inquirers? Several fairly obvious things. (1) Amount of material available -- e.g. all of Greek literature through the 6th century on the TLG disk! (2) Price of the material (on tape, the TLG data cost over $4000; on CD-ROM, it is about 10% of that) (3) Convenience of storage, access, etc. -- I would rather download from a CD-ROM than from a tape drive, any day. It is the old roll vs codex issue once again (microfilm vs microfiche, etc.). (4) Quality control -- what is on the CD-ROM may have errors, but at least they can be identified and controlled (and corrected in a later release); I don't have to wonder whether my dynamic file has become corrupted (as happens more than I want to admit). (5) Speed of access to large bodies of data -- even if the programs are not yet in place and it will take 20 times as long to search a large CD-ROM file on the IBM than on IBYCUS, it is at least possible to do the search (or to search multiple files, in various configurations), which is extremely difficult in any other manner short of a dedicated mini. I am rambling and apologize. Much more needs to be said, but I need to finish preparing ID tables for the CCAT CD-ROM if it is to be mastered by the end of the year! Perhaps it would not be feasible economically to put the Nibelungenlied on its own CD-ROM, but to have it as a small part of a CD-ROM with all sorts of other texts is what we are talking about! That is not only feasible, but it seems to me highly desirable, IBYCUS or not. And I can still download what I want to edit, or manipulate, etc. I lose none of that capability. But I gain by having the original fixed at hand for comparison, etc. Libraries will rapidly be CD-ROM centered, and that is as it ought to be. Hopefully computer centers will not be bypassed by this exciting and useful development! Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Summary of responses on KJV Bible for Macintosh (incl.[152 lines] Date: 2 December 1987, 14:41:59 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 480 (480) Thanks to everyone who responded to my recent inquiry about the availability of the King James Version of the Bible for the Apple Macintosh. I've tried to acknowledge or quote from all the responses (as of 01-Dec) in the summary that follows. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 481 (481) John J. Hughes (XB.J24@STANFORD) had the most definitive answer, reflecting no doubt the research for his book "Bits Bytes and Bible Studies". Robin C. Cover (ZRCC1001@SMUVM1) referenced this book and Marshall Gilliland (GILLILAND@SASK) and Tim Seid (ST401742@BROWNVM) mentioned sources that Hughes lists. Hughes wrote: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are several companies that sell King James Versions of the Bible for Macintoshes. Here are their names, addresses, and so forth. The first program is reviewed in detail in chapter 3 of BITS, BYTES, & BIBLICAL STUDIES (Zondervan, 1987). THE WORD Processor Bible Research Systems 2013 Wells Branch Parkway, Suite 304 Austin, TX 78728 (512) 251-7541 $199.95 Requires 512K; includes menu-driven concording program CP/M version available for Kaypros. MacBible Encycloware 715 Washington St. Ayden, NC 28513 (919) 746-3589 $169 128K; text files that may be read by MacWrite and Microsoft Word. MacScripture Medina Software P.O. Box 1917 Longwood, FL 32750-1917 (305) 281-1557 $119.95 128K; text files designed to be used with MacWrite. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 482 (482) Marshall Gilliland (GILLILAND@SASK) pointed to a very unexpected source, i.e., one of the DECUS (DEC Users Society) tapes. We are an active VAX/VMS site and we did indeed have the tape. It is on VAX System SIG Symposium tape VAX86D (from the Fall 86 DECUS meeting in San Francisco). In uncompressed form the files take about 9000 VAX disk blocks (roughly 5 MB). It is all in upper case. Presumably could be downloaded to a PC, but don't think I will attempt that! Gilliland wrote, in part: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have VAX equipment there and get DECUS tapes then ask one of your systems people for the copy of the ascii text of the KJ Bible that was on a DECUS tape not too long ago (I think in 1987). Marshall Gilliland English Dept. U. of Saskatchewan From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 483 (483) Tim Seid (ST401742@BROWNVM) pointed me to CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) and Bob Kraft (KRAFT@PENNDRLN) from CCAT also responded. Bob Kraft also sent me several files about CCAT and its services and I've tacked CCAT's info-file at the end of this summary ... "old hands" may be aware of CCAT's electronic newsletter, ONLINE NOTES, but it was new to me and their info-file tells how to subscribe. Bob Kraft wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I have not seen my MAC person (Jay Treat) since your inquiry about the KJV arrived, but I am reasonably sure that it is already available from CCAT for the MAC, or will be very soon. We have been distributing the KJV and RSV (along with the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible) to IBM types for over a year now, and all these materials will be on our soon to be released CD-ROM. Most of it has been ported to the MAC as well. I will send you an order form and other information separately. Bob Kraft From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 484 (484) Ronald de Sousa (DESOUS@UTORONTO) mentioned the possibility of using DIALOG services. de Sousa wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- You'll probably get some satisfactory answers, but in the meantime I wonder whether you you that the cheap after-hours service of DIALOG Info Services, called "Knowledge Index", has the King James full text on line, and can be searched using the search options of that service. I seem to recall that for $200 you'd get about 8 hourse of search time -- quite enough for a limited project. Of course, the same is available on DIALOG itself, with somewhat more sophisticated options.. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 485 (485) Roger Hare (R.J.HARE@EDINBURGH.AC.UK) responded from JANET that Catspaw Inc. has the King James Bible. They specialize in supporting PC-based implementations of SNOBOL and related products, as I recall. Roger Hare wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Catspaw do a version of the King james Bible for 50 dollars. My catalogue dosen't say what machine it's for, but if you have access to a maniframe perhaps you could get it onto your Macintosh via file transfers? their address is: Catspaw Inc. PO Box 1123 Salida Colarado 81201 USA. Roger Hare. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 486 (486) Finally, Chuck Bush (ECHUCK@BYUADMIN) mentioned that they have the King James Bible at the Humanities Research Center at Brigham Young University and I presume he could supply more details. Chuck Bush wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- At BYU we do have the text of the King James Bible in machine readable form. The original data is on a mainframe, but we have downloaded it to PC disks etc. for those who have ordered it in other forms. I have a copy of it on a Macintosh Bernoulli cartridge from which it would be relatively easy to copy it to some other Macintosh medium--even floppies. However, this is just the TEXT. There isn't any software to access it conveniently. Sonar is the only text retrieval software I know of for the Macintosh and I don't think it would be very satisfactory. For one thing, it couldn't give you chapter and verse references. Chuck Bush Humanities Research Center Brigham Young University From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 487 (487) Interested HUMANISTs should also consult the guide to external services of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT), Univ. of Pennsylvania, available from Jack Abercrombie (JACKA@PENNDRLS.BITNET) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Vox populi (46 lines) Date: 2 December 1987, 20:29:00 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 488 (488) Dear Colleagues: My thanks to the several people who offered their views on the conversational style of HUMANIST. The majority of speakers have clearly voiced a preference for a somewhat more open manner of conversational exchange than has been the rule so far. For what it's worth, I welcome this change without reservation, since HUMANIST is by design ruled chiefly by its members rather than by its editor. Until an absolutely foolproof method of screening out junk mail is found, I will continue to have all submissions to HUMANIST sent first to me and will forward the ones of human origin to the membership. This means very little work for a very large improvement in the quality of the environment. One of the interesting (but, I guess, not surpising) characteristics of HUMANIST is the number of members who never say anything -- yet continue to put up with the large volume of mail. I imply no criticism whatsoever, for there are many noble and practical reasons for remaining silent. Nevertheless, I suspect that some members may occasionally have something to say but wonder if what they have to say is worthy. In general the advice I follow is, say it and see what happens. One possibility for the diffident is to send in a contribution with a note attached asking my advice, for whatever it's worth. Please let me know if anything about HUMANIST bothers you or otherwise seems to need improvement. The ListServ software (written and maintained on a voluntary basis by a remarkable person who lives in Paris) we cannot fundamentally alter. It has certain characteristics that some may consider flaws but that seem to me merely features to be exploited in the best possible way. Locally HUMANIST is supported by my Centre and by the good will of our Computing Services, i.e., by two busy people. There's not much that can be done given these resources, but some changes can be made without much effort -- like the screening of junk mail. In short, lead on! Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Date: 2 December 1987, 22:53:10 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 489 (489) Heres one for the eager punters; a colleague of mine wants to study the New Kingdom El-Amarna literature (Egypt, mid 14th C BC). Anybody care to say if someone has already typed in such stuff onto the computer? apologies if its obvious... sebastian rahtz computer science university southampton uk From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD ROMs, mainframes Date: 2 December 1987, 23:23:34 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 490 (490) Many thanks to Bob Kraft for his cogent remarks about CD ROMs. I seem to have given a rather scrooge-like impression in my most recent posting about CD ROMs and PCs, which does not reflect my positive opinion of PCs. Yes, CD ROMs are ideal for certain kinds of data distribution, especially for (a) stable data and (b) large numbers of recipients. For humanistic research applications with those characteristics, they are also obviously good ideas. WORM disks, or better yet eraseable mass storage devices, would make many of the same advantages available for non-static data and small numbers of recipients. But neither description fits all research fields. I am less convinced that institutional support for faculty use of mainframes and microcomputers is untypical in North America. This is an empirical question, and I would like to put it up for discussion: what is the situation at the sites represented on HUMANIST with regard to: (a) support for humanities computing formally provided by the institution via centralized or specialized facilities, (b) faculty-student computing on mainframes or minis (c) institutional support for microcomputing (d) institutional support for mainframe-micro data transfer. It is possible that Bob Kraft is right and my experience is untypical. But it seems also possible that Penn and CCAT get so much business from people without mainframe access because those who do have local computer centers get their help locally. It would be useful, I think, for all of us if we could get some idea of the facts in this area. The ACH Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources (the sponsor of HUMANIST) did plan once to distribute a questionnaire to gather this information but the final questionnaire design seems to have been delayed, so let's caucus informally now. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Electronic OED -- for the blind? Date: 2 December 1987, 23:34:33 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 491 (491) I have a blind, computerized friend, a professor of English and a professional writer, who got very excited when I passed on to him the recent messages from HUMANISTS about plans for making the OED available in electronic form. He had visions - no joke intended - of consulting it through his speech synthesizer on his PC. His enthusiasm was dampened by the planned use of colour to display certain types of information. Does anyone happen to know if the OED has any plans for handicapped users? I suppose that there are still architects who design monumental buildings without ramps for wheelchairs, but perhaps... From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Al-Amarna Correspondence (in MRT format) [96 lines] Date: 3 December 1987, 09:55:14 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 492 (492) Sebastian Rahtz asked whether the El-Amarna letters exist in digitized format somewhere. I doubt whether many HUMANISTS are interested in west-semitized Akkadian texts, but this query (and its answer) provides an opportunity to tell a sad and familiar tale...and perhaps an opportunity for someone to come forward with better news than I have to tell... The good news (for our assyriologist friend in the UK) is that Knudtzon's edition of the El-Amarna letters is in machine-readable format. I have used the massive printed "concordances" (two tomes, each about 7 inches thick). These printouts originated at UCLA, so the best bet is to contact Giorgio Buccellati at the department of Near Eastern Studies, who might make tapes or diskettes available. UCLA has a growing corpus of MRT material for the ancient Near East, and in time it will be available publically as part of Buccellati's hypermedia project for Mesopotamia (Computer-Aided Analysis of Mesopotamian Materials); some materials are currently available from Undena, and Buccellati passed out sample diskettes of digitized Eblaite texts at AOS. The sad tale I mentioned earlier is as follows: Du Cerf (a Paris publisher) recently released a superb volume in its series Litteratures anciennes du Proche-Orient on the El-Amarna letters. Its author/translator is William Moran of Harvard University, recognized as a (probably THE) leading Amarna scholar, who has been putting together this polished volume over the past 30-odd years. His translations are based upon extensive museum collations of the tablets, together with restorations that can be made only by someone so familiar with the "idioms" of international diplomacy (in the 14th century B.C.E) as Professor Moran is. So, the MRT edition we *REALLY* want is Moran's, not the 1915 edition of Knudtzon. But you won't find it published on diskette with this Du Cerf volume (which does not even have transliterated original text). According to the publishers, it would not be cost-effective to publish the original text on paper, and as for a MRT edition of the text....well... Shortsightedness like this has to stop, but who is responsible for "stopping it?" A single individual (as in this case, Moran) probably can do very little to force publishers to change their ways. But how about collective bargaining....we publish such scholarly materials ONLY with publishers that are sensitive about the future of scholarship, and about the precious treasure we have in ancient literature. This means placing premium value on original texts in machine-readable form -- only thus are they truly useful and accessible to modern scholarship -- and making these texts available in the public domain. I suspect that this problem is more acute for orientalists than for classicists and other humanities-literary subspecialty areas; we have special orthographies and printing problems which are expensive and demanding. But my suggestion is that we must encourage and demand higher standards of cooperation from publishers such that valuable (priceless!) human efforts are not lost on a Macintosh diskette after it passes from the departmental secretary or word-processing pool to the publisher. Does anyone else share this point of view? Am I too idealistic? While I am in a lament mode, I might as well refer to another problem that needs attention: the problem of coding standards. There are several efforts underway internationally to "encode" ancient Near Eastern texts in transliteration (Toronto - RIM; UCLA; Rome; Helsinki; etc), but to my knowledge there are no agreed-upon standards. In the case of purely alphabetic scripts, the problem is frustrating but not fatal, since we can use consistent-changes programs to standardize the data for archiving. In the case of syllabic (logographic; heiroglyphic) scripts -- Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Egyptian -- the plethora of transliteration schemes is more problematic. No-one sends this kind of data with an SGML prologue, so the best we can hope is that the encoding is consistent and that we can unravel the format codes. If anyone knows about efforts to introduce standards for transliteration and format-coding, would you kindly let me know? I understand that the committee for encoding standards (Nancy Ide; Michael Sperberg-McQueen) recently funded by NEH will not initially address the needs of orientalists. If there are other orientalists "out there" on the HUMANIST reader list -- should we organize ourselves? Apologies to all if this is arcane, recondite or just downright boring. I'd like to know if anyone out there shares some of my frustrations, or sees solutions. Professor Robin C. Cover 3909 Swiss Avenue Dallas, TX 75204 (214) 296-1783 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia Date: 3 December 1987, 09:58:21 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 493 (493) Can anyone tell me if e-mail to the Antipodes (ie Australia) has a charge? and if so who pays---the sender if outside Australia or the Receipient? Thanks in advance. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) on CD-ROM Date: 3 December 1987, 13:36:52 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 494 (494) The following has been contributed by Theodore Brunner, Director of the TLG Project, from a memo circulated to all TLG customers. Anyone wishing to arrange for a license agreement should contact Professor Brunner, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717 U.S.A., telephone: (714) 856-7031, e-mail: TLG@UCIVMSA.bitnet. The license per CD-ROM , including a copy of the printed TLG Canon, is not expensive: ini- tial registration fee (plus first year fee) is $200 to institu- tions and $120 to individuals; annual fee $100 to institutions, $60 to individuals; optional one-time payment for 5 years $500 to institutions, $300 to individuals. (All prices are in US $.) _________________________________________________________________ TLG CD-ROM CUSTOMERS: We have been receiving numerous questions related to TLG CD ROM dissemination plans and policies; here is miscellaneous informa- tion on these subjects: l. To date, the TLG has produced two CD ROMs, disk "A" and disk "B". Disk "A" contains approximately 27 mlllion words of TLG text, as well as an electronic version of the TLG Canon. Disk "B" contains the same 27 million words of text, the TLG, and an Index to the TLG texts on the CD ROM. Disk "A" also contains miscellaneous non-TLG materials, including some Latin, Coptic, and Hebrew texts, some epigraphical materials, as well as portions of the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. The non-TLG materials were included on TLG CD ROM "A" for one reason only: this disk was produced (as was CD ROM "B") primarily for experimental purposes, i.e., to aid in the development of software resources designed to enhance utilization of the (relatively new) CD ROM data storage medium. Neither disk "A" nor disk "B" reflects the High Sierra format standard (established after both of these CD ROMs were produced. 2. In short order, the TLG will release a new CD ROM, disk "C". This disk will contain approximately 41.5 million words of TLG text, an index to this text material, and the TLG Canon. Individuals and institutions already holding license to "A" or "B" disks are entitled to receive "C" disks free of charge. This (as provided for in the license agreement governing use of TLG ROMs) will be on an exchange basis, i.e., disks previously issued by the TLG must be returned to the TLG prior to the issuance of a "C" disk. TLG LICENSEES SHOULD NOT RETURN THEIR "A" OR "B" DISKS UNTIL DISK "C" IS OFFICIALLY RELEASED. [Notice will appear on HUMANIST when disk "C" is ready.] 3. Questions have been raised about the absence of non-TLG material on the "C" disk. The TLG controls and licenses only its own materials, and license agreements previously executed pertain to the TLG materials on the disks only. Current TLG CD ROM licensees may, of course, continue to use their ("A" or "B") disks throughout the course of their license period; they will not be issued "C" disks, however, until they have returned their earlier CD ROM versions to the TLG. It is the case, however, that the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) will be releasing its own CD ROM in the very near future; this disk will contain Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, and epigraphical materials, as well as a significant portion of the Duke papyrological data bank. It can be assumed that individuals and institutions desirous of these materials can make arrangements with PHI to gain access to them on a PHI disk. Further informa- tion on this subject can be obtained by contacting John Gleason, Packard Humanities Institute, P.0. Box 1330 Los Altos, CA 94022 U.S.A. 4. We have received numerous requests for technical documenta- tion related to the forthcoming TLG CD ROM "C". The internal organization of the text files and of the I.D. table files will be identical to the organization of these files on TLG CD ROM "A". The file directory and author table will be reorganized to reflect the High Sierra standard. More detailed documentation is currently being prepared and should be ready for distribution in the near future. Theodore F. Brunner, Director November 8, 1987 _________________________________________________________________ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Enlightening the publishers, encoding Semitic (65 lines) Date: 3 December 1987, 15:00:56 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 495 (495) Three cheers for Robin Cover's idea of group pressure to bring publishers to their senses regarding the preservation and distribution of machine-readable materials. Some publishers, to their credit, are already alert to the issues involved--or so say people who should know. But there are still an awful lot of them out there who behave the way Renaissance printers did with Carolingian manuscripts: mark it up, print it, and throw it out. Anything we can do to preserve the fruits of scholarly labors, we should do. It would also be useful to have a better developed system of text archives in North America -- either a network of regional or discipline-based archives, or one central archive that would take anything (the way Oxford does). The latter would be appealing because fewer texts might fall through cracks in the system, but specialized collections would remain important because they can do more intensive work on their holdings, the way Penn's CCAT does. A central North American text archive, acting in concert with the European archives, might also be in a position to help exert the kind of group pressure on publishers that Robin Cover suggests. Making the publisher's texts usable, by documenting as far as possible the usual systems of typesetting codes found in the publishing industry, is one goal of the ACH/ACL/ALLC initiative for text-encoding guidelines. (That goal is not wholly explicit in the final document I posted here a couple of days ago, but it was discussed at length during the planning meeting at Vassar and clearly is important to a lot of people.) The consensus of the planners at Vassar was also that transliteration practices, and conventions for the encoding of character sets, should at least be documented as far as possible in the guidelines. Many participants were leery of making specific recommendations for the representation of specific characters, since local hardware features and requirements can vary so widely. Nevertheless, the experts present agreed that it would not be insuperably difficult to provide adequate documentation for the encoding of scripts which, like Semitic scripts, provide special challenges to most commonly available hardware. That means that the guidelines can and should contain full information on practices for encoding texts of interest to Orientalists--if the Orientalists will document their existing practices. If they can also agree on common recommendations for future work, that consensus can and should also be documented. The same goes for any and all other specialized interests. These guidelines will belong to the humanities computing community as a whole, and I hope the community will work together to make them as complete and useful as we can. Again, I reiterate the invitation: anyone interested in helping formulate the guidelines, either in general or with respect to some specific question (e.g. the encoding of Akkadian, or the encoding of numismatic materials, or the encoding of manuscript variants, or the prosodic transcription of oral texts, or the encoding of hypertext materials, or ...), should please contact Nancy Ide or myself. This invitation will be periodically renewed, as details for the formal arrangement of the drafting committees are set, but if you let us know now, we will have a better idea of how much interest there is, and what kinds of special problems are on people's minds. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago P.S. The opinions here expressed are as always mine, not necessarily those of my employer, or the ACH, or the guidelines steering committee. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia (24 lines) Date: 3 December 1987, 19:16:39 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 496 (496) E-mail involving ACSNet (Australia, through the international gateways, or even domestically between sites I think) has a charge for the Australian end (whether sender or receiver). It was something like 10c/message plus 2c/line about a year ago. Apparently many institutions do not (yet?) pass on the charge to individual users. The official position could presumably be got from postmaster@munnari.oz, i.e. David Nash Center for Cognitive Science 20B-225 MIT Cambridge MA 02139 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Archives (75 lines) Date: 3 December 1987, 19:20:14 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 497 (497) In response to Prof. Cover's impassioned plea, I can only say that it IS possible, with some concerted effort to force publishers to change their ways. The American Sociological Association has recently, as of Sept 1, 1987, in fact, begun to require of all periodicals published under their aegis, that any computer readable files, (both data and software) BE CITED in the bibliography. There is an effort under way now to convince other academic publishers to follow suit. There are a number of reasons for citation of computer files: (a) computer-readable files are intellectual property in their own right, quite as much as publications in other media, eg on paper, film, audio-tape, canvas, etc. (This has been recognized by that most conservative institution, the American Library Association, since the late 1970s.) The authors (properly called 'principal investigators'), producers, publishers, editors, and translators, of computer-readable files deserve for their labours the same acknowledgement and recognition as do the authors, composers, etc of intellectual property in more traditional media. (b) the citation of source materials in the bibliographies of publications acknowledges the source materials used in the research process, thus enabling ones peers to follow the same line of reasonsing, using the same source materials, to (hopefully) come to the same conclusions, thus corroborating our initial reasoning - ie the peer review process. (c) once computer-readable files are cited in bibliographies, they will get picked up in the citation indices, and thus eventually come to the attention of tenure committees. Thus individual 'authors' of these things will in time receive their due academic brownie-points. But citing computer-readable files is not enough. There must also be a mechanism for preserving them for posterity and making them available to others for secondary analysis. Researchers are reluctant to make 'their' files available to others for fear that they will not receive their due acknowledgement (- the polite reason). Mandatory citation of computer files in publications should help reduce this fear. Many researchers are not aware that there in fact exists a network of local data archives/data libraries in academic institutions throughout the United States and Canada, as well as a well developed system of national data archives in Europe, most recently in Hungary, Israel, and the USSR. Granted, these data archives primarily concentrate on 'social science' data files, primarily because that is the field from which the initial impetus for their creation came. However, this orientation is not cast in stone. And most of these data archives/libraries could with appropriate overtures, be convinced that there are other user communities that also need their services. The social scientists just happen to have been among the earliest and most vociferous. The point being that there is already an institutional framework, staffed by knowledgeable and experienced people who with very little effort could provide the network of text archives that humanists seem to want - all they want is a little proding. ------------------------------------------------------------ Laine Ruus, University of British Columbia Data Library userDLDB@ubcmtsg.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia Date: 3 December 1987, 19:22:30 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 498 (498) There is a relay at ULCC (UK) called EAN which links with ACSnet - the fact that you do not register before submitting suggests it is 'free': you may be able to learn further from mailing an enquiry to laision@uk.ac.ean-relay EAN can also link you to other European sites as well - maybe to addresses 'missing' from EARN stephen@uk.ac.oxford.vax From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs Date: 4 December 1987, 13:02:56 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 499 (499) Contributed by Bob Kraft Just to supplement Ted Brunner's information on the TLG CD-ROM, regarding the non-TLG materials such as were included on TLG disk "A" -- the present plan is for the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) jointly with the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) at Penn to produce an "experimental" CD-ROM at the heart of which will be various Latin texts (being prepared at PHI), Greek Papyri (Duke) and Inscriptions (Cornell, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study), and a variety of biblical and related materials in various languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Armenian) as well as sample files from various other sources and projects (e.g. Dante Commentary project, Milton Latin project, Kierkegaard in Danish, Arabic poetry, some word lists, etc.). I call this disk a "Sampler," and it is scheduled to be ready for distribution by the end of this month (December). Again, the aim is to give scholars, software developers, etc., a body of consistently formatted (more or less!) materials on which to work in various directions and at little cost. There will be a notice on HUMANIST when the PHI/CCAT joint CD-ROM "Sampler" is ready for distribution! Bob Kraft for CCAT From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Enlightening the publishers, encoding Semitic (65 lines) Date: 4 December 1987, 13:10:19 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 500 (500) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Michael Sperberg-McQueen has suggested that we need a text archive in North America. Is that a generally felt need? What could a text archive here offer that Oxford does not offer? Certainly, shipping would be faster and cheaper, but is there something more substantial? Or are there real hardships now? Or, could our needs be addressed by some adjustments in the services that Oxford provides---such that we might better discuss our needs with Oxford instead of duplicating their efforts. If we DO need an archive in North America, who should institute and manage it? What is the proper sort of organization? And what's in it for them? Will it be a costly burden? Or are we willing to pay for materials in order support such a facility? Would it be commercial or non-profit? --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ACH text markup Date: 4 December 1987, 13:17:33 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 501 (501) Contributed by James H. Coombs Some thoughts on guidelines for text markup, in response to Michael Sperberg-McQueen's note. 1) Markup must be descriptive. 2) Delimiters should be '<' and '>' in conformance with the default of the new SMGL standard. 3) Markup/tag attributes should be allowed, and attribute names should be descriptive. 4) There should be no attempt at establishing a "closed" tag set. The current AAP SGML application allows for definition of new tags, but it does not support such definition in a practical way. The consequence is that people will use "list items," for example, when they should be using "line of poetry." Within these guidelines, it can only be healthy to provide a list of tags that people should choose from when tagging certain entities. The point of this is that we cannot predict what textual elements will be of significance for what researchers. We have to allow for the discovery of textual elements that no one has categorized previously. At the same time, there is no point in having 30 different tags for "line of poetry." The guidelines should make clear that DESCRIPTION is paramount and that the use of particular tags is secondary. 5) In so far as possible, there should be requirements for minimal tagging. It would be a mistake to fail to tag "verse paragraphs" and "book" in *Paradise Lost*, for example, and any version that does not provide such tags must be considered inadequate and, ultimately, rejected. 6) There can be no limit placed on "maximal" tagging. If a researcher needs every word tagged, we must allow for this. It is a trivial matter to ignore or strip out such tagging. Researchers with such needs cannot, at least for now, reasonably expect that others will provide such exhaustive tagging. Putting (5) and (6) together, we have a principle of base-level tagging with as much additional information as the original researchers care to provide. Where there are common needs that may not be shared by the original researcher, it may still be appropriate to require that those common needs be met. For example, the original researcher may not need to know about verse paragraphs, but we should still require that they be appropriately tagged. 7) Referential markup should be used in place of "special" characters, such as accented characters. If a particular configuration supports an acute accent, for example, in hardware, the researcher may take advantage of those facilities. When checking the document into an archive or passing it on to others, however, the acute accent must be translated to "á" (or whatever the SGML standard specifies---don't have my copy at hand). This is off the top of my head, but enough for now. I have other ideas on this stuff, but they can come out if discussion ensues. I am interested in the project, but I don't have the time or money to travel to meetings right now. I also get the feeling from the preliminary document that you posted that people are re-inventing SGML. We already have, in SGML, a metalanguage for generating descriptive markup languages. I don't think that we need Document Type Definitions right now, but even they might turn out to be useful once SGML is established and SGML-support tools become widespread. I haven't provided any defense of descriptive markup or SGML here. We discuss the advantages of these systems in "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing," *Communications of the ACM*, November 1987--- written with Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose. Interested in any and all comments! --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: "International Educational Computing" Date: 4 December 1987, 16:03:15 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 502 (502) POSSIBLE COURSE 3551 - SUMMER, 1988 - R. G. RAGSDALE The European Conference on Computers in Education is being held in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 24-29, 1988. When the World Conference on Computers in Education was held there in 1981, a substantial number of OISE students attended, some as a portion of a course offered by Bob McLean. I propose to offer a course, 3551 - International Educational Computing: An Interaction of Values and Technology, which would take place in Switzerland, around the dates of the conference. Permission to offer the course formally depends on several factors, including the number of students likely to attend. Plans are incomplete at this time, but a projection of the plans indicates the following format, assuming that all necessary arrangements for housing, classroom, etc., can be made. The course participants will meet together July 18-22 to study previous research and theory on values and technology, methods for evaluating the effects of technology, and case studies in business and education of technology-value conflicts. The daily schedule will have more formal sessions (lecture, seminar) in the mornings and less formal sessions (group discussions) in the early evening, with afternoons free for individual study or other activities (scheduled class time for each day will be four hours, probably two and a half in the morning, one and a half in the evening). During this week, participants will select and prepare for the issue(s) they plan to study during the conference. At the conference, each participant will focus on one or more topics, such as a particular age range, subject matter area, or type of computer application. They will collect material from the formal sessions, but also from informal interviews with others attending the conference, both presenters and those who are only attending. August 1 is a Swiss national holiday (which all course participants should enjoy), so the remaining sessions will take place August 2-5, following the same schedule as the first week. During this time the results of the previous week's activities will be presented and group feedback will obtained. Final papers will be due in mid-September. Preliminary arrangements for accommodation and classroom space have been made at Aiglon College, an English boarding school in Chesieres, Switzerland, about one hour from Lausanne by train and bus. Room rates include the "taxe de sejour" which gives access to the recreational facilities of Villars, such as the swimming pool, ice skating, etc. _________ ____ Estimated_Cost Based on 1987 prices, the airfare to Geneva is $927, room and board is 860SF (Swiss Francs) for 20 days, and the conference registration is 280SF (higher after January 31). At current exchange rates, these items total almost $2,000. A better estimate would include ground transportation, other likely expenses (chocolate, etc.), and possible price increases. It seems extremely unlikely that necessary expenses would exceed $2,500. Anyone who is interested in participating in this course should indicate this to me in writing (including, if possible, your "estimate of certainty"). From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TEXT MARK-UP (73 lines) Date: 6 December 1987, 11:02:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 503 (503) Contributed by Nancy Ide I recently responded to Jim Coombs' remarks concerning the principles developed at Poughkeepsie as a basis for the development of a standard for encoding machine-readable texts. He suggested that we make our discussion "public," in the spirit of recent remarks on HUMANIST, and so I will briefly describe what has been said and put forth my reply. I inidicated to Jim that much of what he says is very much in the spirit of the discussions at Poughkeepsie among the 31 participants. This shou ld be made clearer in the minutes of the meeting, which Lou Burnard has drawn up and which will be available from him or me in a few days. Especially, we intend to make the standard extensible to accomodate the unforeseen needs of individual projects. I also indicated that the standard will *recommend* a minimum set of tags for texts, which is stated in the principles under number 5, I believe. We had a lively discussion on this topic (actually, all of the discussions we very lively!) at the Poughkeepsie meeting, with some disagreement about specifying a minumum. This is why *recommend* is in emphasis. The feeling at the meeting was that we can *require* nothing, but we can do our best to "guide the perplexed" and provide some idea of what it makes sense to encode regardless of how the text is originally intended to be used. I should point out here that among participants in the Poughkeepsie meeting, there were two clear perspectives on the whole issue of encoding texts: one saw most encoding as a future endeavor, and the other was focused on texts already encoded. One's opinion concerning whether most texts have been encoded already or have yet to be encoded obviously affects opinion on the importance of specifying a minimum set of tags for encoded texts. Jim responded to me suggesting that we could refuse to accept texts that had been encoded without the "minimum" tags we might expect. He made all of the excellent arguments for insisting that certain tags be included *anytime* a tex is encoded. But the problem here is that I am not sure who the "we" who is to do this refusing actually is. If someone does not provide the minimum tags but has encoded the collected works of some obscure author I am interested in, will I refuse to accept the text? If I am an archive, should I refuse to take the text--that is, is it better to have an inadequately tagged text or none at all? Admittedly, in some cases it may be better to start from scratch and re-enter a text, if the existing version is pitifully done. But most of the time it will be easier to go in and mark whatever I need to mark in the existing version than to re-enter the text entirely. Similarly, we cannot expect archives to ensure that their texts contain a minimum tag set. This was a point of considerable concern to the keepers of archives present at the meeting, and led to the final agreement that only the tags that are present (whatever they may be) in a text that is distributed by an archive will conform to the standard. This requirement in itself will necessitate the writing of programs to perform tranlsation to the new scheme, another topic addressed at some length and for which there seems to be support. However, note that the principles indicate that texts now contained in the archive need not be converted retrospectively. Naturally, although this is not required we hope that it will occur in many cases. So, the guidelines that will be developed will recommend a minimum set of tags---especially, for those things that are easily encoded when the source text is at hand and which are also obviously of use in most types of analysis. However, it does not appear to me that it is reasonable to require such tagging. We can only hope that the recommendation is enough to inspire most researchers to provide the minimum set of tags when they encode new texts. Nancy M. Ide ide@vassar.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: more on mark-up (34 lines) Date: 6 December 1987, 11:10:43 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 504 (504) Contributed by Nancy Ide In my earlier message I neglected to summarize my reply to Jim Coombs concerning SGML. We have every expectation that the standard we devise will be an application of SGML, but until we know fully our needs it is not prudent to commit ourselves to SGML. We know, for instance, that while it is possible to define multiple parallel hierarchies in SGML it is not entirely straightforward, and such parallel hierarchies are likely to be used extensively in encoding machine-readable texts intended for literary, linguistic, and historical analysis. We hope that in any event the standard will be compatible with SGML, which, as Jim points out, is bound to become widely accepted and used. Also, Jim had some concern about our defining a meta-language, since SGML (the abstract syntax) is in fact a meta-language for describing a mark-up scheme. The concrete syntax of SGML is one mark-up scheme described by this abstract syntax. However, our goal is to provide a meta-language in which *all* existing mark-up schemes can be described (which may prove to be impossible), and it seems to us that the abstract syntax of SGML is inadequate for this task. The abstract syntax of SGML was not intended for this purpose, it should be noted. Nancy M. Ide ide@vassar.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Use of electronic communictions (29 lines) Date: 6 December 1987, 11:15:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 505 (505) Contributed by C. S. Hunter Willard notes the high percentage of "silent participants" on HUMANIST. My experience with computer conferencing systems makes his note not at all surprising. At the University of Guelph we have had our CoSy conferencing system available free of charge to all faculty for some years now. Only about 40 % of the faculty actually took us up on the offer of a free account on the system. Of that 40 %, only 25 % (or less) actively use the system more than once a week. The ratio of active to passive participants on the system is something like 1 : 9. The same is roughly true on the student system, where only about 10 % of the registered users are actual active participants. We are now studying the phenomenon to determine what factors contribute to the individual use or non-use of computer-mediated communication among academics. . C. Stuart Hunter, University of Guelph cshunter@uoguelph From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia Date: 6 December 1987, 11:41:45 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 506 (506) Contributed by Emmanuel Tov IN REPLY TO THE QUESTION OF BRENDAN O'FLAHERTY (3 DEC) I CAN TELL YOU THAT MAIL FROM SYDNEY (MACQUARIE UNIV.) TO ISRAEL AND EUROPE AND THE U.S. IS FREE AS WELL AS REVERSE MAIL. EMANUEL TOV From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding Date: 6 December 1987, 16:58:56 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 507 (507) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" [In reply to Nancy Ide's points about SGML and related matters. The inset paragraphs quote from her messages. -- ed.] We have every expectation that the standard we devise will be an application of SGML, but until we know fully our needs it is not prudent to commit ourselves to SGML. A minor philosophical point, I guess: I don't think that we CAN know our needs fully. We need standards that accommodate needs that cannot be predicted today. The practical consequence of this observation, which I'm sure Nancy would agree with, is that one should seek a "productive" system instead of a system that satisfies everything on a list, and one should not spend a lot of time developing the list. We know, for instance, that while it is possible to define multiple parallel hierarchies in SGML it is not entirely straightforward, and such parallel hierarchies are likely to be used extensively in encoding machine-readable texts intended for literary, linguistic, and historical analysis. What are "multiple parallel hierarchies"? I can guess, but I want to be sure that I understand the problem. In a most documents, we have, for example, pragmatic and syntactic hierarchies. One has no difficulty marking up documents for both at the same time (although one does not normally mark up the latter descriptively). Pragmatically, we have things like [ [ [ ] [ ] ] ] CHAPTER SECTION PARAGRAPH PARAGRAPH Syntactically, we might have [ [ ] [ [ ] ] ] S NP VP NP So far as I know, there are no difficulties in marking up both types of hierarchies. One could argue that we really have a single hierarchy here, but, conceptually at least, we have two different domains: pragmatics and syntax. Well, this distinction is bound to be controversial, to say the least! This is probably the wrong list for a discussion about syntax vs. pragmatics, etc. I can try other examples, but I'm still guessing. And I'm still wondering what the difficulty is in encoding them under SGML. However, our goal is to provide a meta-language in which *all* existing mark-up schemes can be described (which may prove to be impossible), and it seems to us that the abstract syntax of SGML is inadequate for this task. What is the practical value of a metalanguage that generates all markup languages? I would think that it would be so abstract as to be of no value. I suspect that this is part of the goal of salvaging work that has been inadequately coded. I believe that we will be better off if we worry less about the past and plan more for the future. I suppose that it's true that publishers have typesetting tapes in their basements, and that we could use those tapes. I think that we have to accept that those tapes are of little value until someone converts the coding to descriptive markup. I have the typesetting tape for the American Heritage Dictionary (sorry, can't distribute it); no one wasted time trying to figure out how to use that tape as it is now. I know of several projects that are based on that tape, and all required conversions. Ideally, the tape would have been converted once and for all (and it apparently has been now). Whether it's a dictionary or a literary text, we can expect that inadequate coding will cause considerable work for anyone attempting to use the database. A metalanguage that includes procedural markup as well as descriptive markup will not help in such a case, because one still has to map procedural markup onto descriptive markup in order to be able to work with meaningful entities (definition, paragraph, etc.). Since procedural markup tends to be performed somewhat arbitrarily and does not normally provide a one-to-one relationship between entity and markup, there is no metalanguage that will help a researcher perform the necessary conversions. What we really need is a sensible and dynamic standard. I don't think that anyone would argue that that standard should be anything other than descriptively based. Since we are going to have to convert texts to descriptive markup in order to use them anyway, why not just develop the standard and convert as necessary. Trying to save the past is just going to retard development. I haven't mentioned SGML so far. Is there a problem with SGML? I have heard complaints, and we addressed them in our article. No one expects individual scholars to master the full syntax and to generate Document Type Definitions (DTD). What we want is accurate and consistent descriptive markup. In our experience at Brown, people have no difficulties mastering the principles of descriptive markup. We can leave the development of DTDs to experts. --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Markup: on requirements Date: 6 December 1987, 17:12:16 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 508 (508) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" My thanks to Nancy Ide for moving the discussion out to HUMANIST. Things have fallen a little out of sequence, but the ideas are more important than the sequence anyway. I have also heard from Michael Sperberg-McQueen, and I hope that he will post his very informative note as well. If this discussion becomes aggravating for the majority of HUMANISTs and there is enough interest, then perhaps we can form a separate mailing list. So, here is my (unedited) reply to the issue of requirements. While we may not be able to require that people conform to a standard fully, we can refuse to accept inadequate texts. There is an atmosophere of poverty now such that we are anxious to have whatever we can get our hands on. At the extreme, even now most of us would reject a text that is all in upper case and contains errors---it turns out to be easier to do it oneself. If we consider what things will be like or could be like in a few years though, I think it's appropriate to say that there are certain minimal standards (or one must comply with with a standard). First, we don't accept just anything for other scholarly documents. Second, we will have more alternatives for sources. Third, we want high quality sources so that people won't have to keep reworking or entirely redoing. If I can't count on a text from a particular archive to meet my needs, what is my motivation for bothering with that archive; and what is the motivation for the archive's existence? I certainly would not want to see it supported by public funds. I don't think that this places an inordinate burden on individual researchers. For the most part, I'm sure that it's considerably less burdensome than ensuring that one's bibliography, for example, accords with the MLA style sheet (and what bibliography unambiguously does?). --Jim I should elaborate briefly. First, I have/had a tape of Milton's *Paradise Lost*; it was so bad that I would prefer to start from scratch. Second, I think that we have a right to expect archives to set and maintain certain standards. Perhaps they don't want to accept that responsibility right now. If not, then I think that we should be planning to develop and support a good archive. Does such an archive need several programmers for text validation and maintenance? Then they should have the support to hire them. Let's centralize the expense as much as possible. Currently, we have no idea who is entering what and how they are doing it. Even if we could get people to go to the archive, the current approach means that many people are going to have to massage texts into useful formats, and every project will have to ensure that the text is accurate. It's as if we all had to revise our copies of *Paradise Lost* and then go proof read them before we could use them. Finally, I have texts that I have entered, marked up, and proof read, but I'm reluctant to check them into an archive that is inconsistent at best. Whatever professional credit I might get for the contribution---well, let's say that the effort is somewhat discredited by the state of the archive. It's like publishing a book with XYZ press instead of ABC. I would be happy to send it off to someone who provides full services and validates text, and I would be happy to make any necessary corrections. To reverse the roles, I am reluctant to acquire a text from an archive that makes no guarantees. After all, in the process of keyboarding a text, I get to read it, and the time goes quickly. It's the proofreading that is burdensome, and I still have to proofread. (Or do I get to say that I used X's text, and X is going to accept the responsibility for errors.) --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ACL Applied Natural Language Conference (833 lines) Date: 6 December 1987, 17:24:17 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 509 (509) The following is republished from IRLIST, the Information Retrieval List. -- ed.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The printed version of the following program and registration information will be mailed to ACL members early in December. Others are encouraged to use the attached form or write for a booklet to the following address: Dr. D.E. Walker (ACL), 445 South Street - MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA, or to walker@flash.bellcore.com, specifying "ACL Applied" on the subject line. ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 9 - 12 February 1988 Austin Marriott at the Capitol, Austin, Texas, USA ADVANCE PROGRAM Features: Six introductory and advanced tutorials Three days of papers on the state-of-the-art Distinguished luncheon speakers A panel of industry leaders Exhibits and demonstrations REGISTRATION : 7:30am - 3:00pm, Tuesday, 9 February, Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26th and Red River. EXHIBITS : 10:00am - 6:00pm, Wednesday, 10 February GENERAL SESSIONS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1988 SESSION 1: SYSTEMS SESSION 2: GENERATION SESSION 3: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS SESSION 4: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1988 SESSION 5: SYSTEMS SESSION 6: TEXT PROCESSING SESSION 7: MACHINE TRANSLATION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1988 SESSION 8: SYSTEMS SESSION 9: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON SESSION 10: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS REGISTRATION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS PREREGISTRATION MUST BE RECEIVED BY 25 JANUARY; after that date, please wait to register at the Conference itself. Complete the attached ``Application for Registration'' and send it with a check payable to Association for Computational Linguistics or ACL to Donald E. Walker (ACL), Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA; (201) 829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com; ucbvax!bellcore!walker. If a registration is cancelled before 25 January, the registration fee, less $15 for administrative costs, will be returned. Full conference registrants will also receive lunch on the 10th and 11th. Registration includes one copy of the Proceedings, available at the Conference. Copies of the Proceedings at $20 for members ($30 for nonmembers) may be ordered on the registration form or by mail prepaid from Walker. TUTORIALS : Attendance is limited. Preregistration is encouraged to ensure a place and the availability of syllabus materials. RECEPTIONS : The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) will host a reception for the conference at its site on Wednesday evening. To aid in planning we ask that you complete the RSVP on the registration form. In addition there will be receptions at the conference hotel on Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon. EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS : Facilities for exhibits and system demonstrations will be available. Persons wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should contact Kent Wittenburg, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3626; wittenburg@mcc.com as soon as possible. HOTEL RESERVATIONS : Reservations at the Austin Marriott at the Capitol MUST be made using the Hotel Reservation Form included with this flyer. Reservations subject to guest room availability for reservations received after 25 January 1988. Please mail to: Austin Marriott at the Capitol AIR TRANSPORTATION : American Airlines offers conferees a special 35% off full coach fare, 30% off full Y fares for passengers originating in Canada, or 5% off any published roundtrip airfare applicable to and from Austin. Call toll free 1-800-433-1790 and give the conference's STAR number S81816. If you normally use the service of a travel agent, please have them make your reservations through this number. DIRECTIONS : There is one public exit from Robert Mueller Airport in Austin; at the traffic light, turn right (onto Manor Rd.) and drive to Airport Blvd. (approx. 1/4 - 1/2 mile). Turn right on Airport Blvd., and drive to highway I-35 (approx. 1-2 miles). Turn left (south) onto I-35, heading toward town. Get off at the 11th-12th St. (Capitol) exit, and drive an extra block on the access road, to 11th St. The Marriott is on the SW corner of that intersection (across 11th St., on the right). A parking garage is attached. The Marriott at the Capitol operates a free shuttle to and from the airport. Cab fare would be approx. $6. The Joe C. Thompson Conference Center parking lot is on the SW corner of Red River and 26th Street; the entrance is on Red River, and a guard will point out the center (adjacent, to the west). Directions to JCT from Marriott parking garage: Turn right (S) on I-35 frontage road, turn right (W) on 10th St., turn right (N) on Red River, and drive [almost] to 26th. APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION Association for Computational Linguistics, Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, 9 - 12 February 1988, Austin, Texas NAME _________________________________________________________________ Last First Middle AFFILIATION (Short form for badge ID) ___________________________________________________________ ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ TELEPHONE ____________________________________________________________ COMPUTER NET ADDRESS _________________________________________________ REGISTRATION INFORMATION (circle fee) ACL NON- FULL-TIME MEMBER* MEMBER* STUDENT* by 25 JANUARY $170 $205 $85 at the Conference $220 $255 $110 *Member and Non-Member fees include Wednesday and Thursday luncheons; Students can purchase luncheon tickets at a reduced rate. LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR STUDENTS: $10 each; Wednesday _____; Thursday ________; amount enclosed $ ______ LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR GUESTS: $15 each; Wednesday _____; Thursday ________; amount enclosed $ ______ SPECIAL MEALS: VEGETARIAN ______ KOSHER ______ EXTRA PROCEEDINGS: $20 members; $30 non-members; amount enclosed $ ______ TUTORIAL INFORMATION (circle fee and check at most two tutorials) FEE PER TUTORIAL ACL NON- FULL-TIME MEMBER MEMBER* STUDENT by 25 January $75 $110 $50 at the Conference $100 $135 $65 *Non-member tutorial fee includes ACL membership for 1988; do not pay non-member fee for BOTH registration and tutorials. Morning Tutorials: select ONE: INTRODUCTION: Allen LEXICONS: Boguraev & SPEECH: Roucos Levin Afternoon Tutorials: select ONE: INTERFACES: Hafner LOGIC: Moore TRANSLATION: Nirenburg TOTAL PAYMENT MUST BE INCLUDED : $ ____________ (Registration, Luncheons, Extra Proceedings, Tutorials) Make checks payable to ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS or ACL. Credit cards cannot be honored. RSVP for MCC Reception: Please check if you plan to attend the MCC reception on Wednesday evening, February 10th. _________ Send Application for Registration WITH PAYMENT before 25 January to the address below; AFTER 25 January, wait to register at Conference: Donald E. Walker (ACL) Bell Communications Research 445 South Street, MRE 2A379 Morristown, NJ 07960, USA (201)829-4312 walker@flash.bellcore.com ucbvax!bellcore!walker APPLICATION FOR HOTEL REGISTRATION Reservations subject to guest room availability for reservations received after 25 January 1988. In the event of unanticipated demand, rooms will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Please send in your reservation request as early as possible. NAME _________________________________________________________________ Last First Middle AFFILIATION ___________________________________________________________ ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ TELEPHONE ____________________________________________________________ Room Requirements Single $64 ________ Double $74 ________ Date and time of arrival _________________________________________ Date and time of departure _______________________________________ Complete if arrival after 6PM __________________________________________________________________ Credit Card Name Number Expiration Date Send Application for Hotel Reservation to: Austin Marriott at the Capitol ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TUTORIALS 9 February 1988 Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin Morning 8:30 A.M. - 12:30 P.M. ABSTRACT This tutorial will cover the basic concepts underlying the construction of natural language processing systems. These include basic parsing techniques, semantic interpretation and the representation of sentence meaning, as well as knowledge representation and techniques for understanding natural language in context. In particular, the topics to be addressed in detail will include augmented transition networks (ATNs), augmented context-free grammars, the representation of lexical meaning, especially looking at case-grammar based representations, and the interpretation of pronouns and ellipsis. In addition, there will be an overview of knowledge representation, including semantic networks, frame-based systems, and logic, and the use of general world knowledge in language understanding, including scripts and plans. Given the large range of issues and techniques, an emphasis will be placed on those aspects relevant to existing practical natural language systems, such as interfaces to database systems. The remaining issues will be more quickly surveyed to give the attendee an idea of what techniques will become important in the next generation of natural language systems. The lecture notes will include an extensive bibliography of work in each area. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at people who are interested in learning the fundamental techniques and ideas relevant to natural language processing. It will be useful to managers who want an overview of the field, to programmers starting research and development in the natural language area, and to researchers in related disciplines such as linguistics who want a survey of the computational approaches to language. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. James Allen is an Associate Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester. He is editor of the journal Computational Linguistics and author of the book Natural Language Understanding, published in 1987. In 1984, he received a five-year Presidential Young Investigator award for his research in Artificial Intelligence. ABSTRACT The lexical information contained explicitly and implicitly in machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) can support a wide range of activities in computational linguistics, both of theoretical interest and of practical importance. This tutorial falls into two parts. The first part will focus on some characteristics of raw lexical data in electronic sources, which make MRDs particularly relevant to natural language processing applications. The second part will discuss how theoretical linguistic research into the lexicon can enhance the contribution of MRDs to applied computational linguistics. The first half will discuss issues concerning the placement of rich lexical resources on-line; raise questions related to the suitability, and ultimately the utility, of MRDs for automatic natural language processing; outline a methodology aimed at extracting maximally usable subsets of the dictionary with minimal introduction of errors; and present ways in which specific use can be made of the lexical data for the construction of practical language processing systems with substantial coverage. The second half of the tutorial will review current theoretical linguistic research on the lexicon, emphasizing proposals concerning the nature of lexical representation and lexical organization. This overview will provide the context for an examination of how the results of this research can be brought to bear on the problem of extracting syntactic and semantic information encoded in dictionary entries, but not overtly signaled to the dictionary user. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial presupposes some familiarity with work in both computational and theoretical linguistics. It is aimed at researchers in natural language processing and theoretical linguists who want to take advantage of the resources available in MRDs for both applied and theoretical purposes. The issues of providing substantial lexical coverage and system transportability are addressed, thus making this tutorial of particular relevance to those concerned with the automatic acquisition, on a large scale and in a flexible format, of phonological, syntactic, and semantic information for nlp systems. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES Dr. Branimir Boguraev is an SERC (UK Science & Engineering Research Council) Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has been with the Computer Laboratory since 1975, and completed a doctoral thesis in natural language processing there in 1979. Recently he has been involved in the development of computational tools for natural language processing, funded by grants awarded by the UK Alvey Programme in Information Technology. Dr. Beth Levin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She was a System Development Foundation Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science from 1983-1987 where she assumed major responsibility for directing the MIT Lexicon Project. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in June 1983. ABSTRACT: This tutorial will present the issues in developing spoken language systems for natural speech communication between a person and a machine. In particular, the performance of complex tasks using large vocabularies and unrestricted sentence structures will be examined. The first Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Speech Understanding Research project during the seventies will be reviewed, and then the current state-of-the-art in continuous speech recognition and natural language processing will be described. Finally, the types of spoken language systems' capabilities expected to be developed during the next two to three years will be presented. The technical issues that will be covered include acoustic-phonetic modeling, syntax, semantics, plan recognition and discourse, and the issues for integrating these knowledge sources for speech understanding. In addition, computational requirements for real-time understanding, and performance evaluation methodology will be described. Some of the human factors of speech understanding in the context of performing interactive tasks using an integrated interface will also be discussed. INTENDED AUDIENCE: This tutorial is aimed at technical managers, product developers, and technical staff interested in learning about spoken language systems and their potential applications. No expertise in either speech or natural language will be assumed in introducing the technical details in the tutorial. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Dr. Salim Roucos has worked for seven years at BBN Laboratories in speech processing such as continuous speech recognition, speaker recognition, and speech compression. More recently, he has been the principal investigator on integrating speech recognition and natural language understanding for developing a spoken language system. His areas of interest are statistical pattern recognition and language modeling. Dr. Roucos is chairman of the Digital Signal Processing committee of the IEEE ASSP society. Afternoon 1:30 P.M. - 5:30 P.M. ABSTRACT This tutorial will describe the development of natural language processing from a research topic into a commercial technology. This will include a description of some key research projects of the 1970's and early 1980's which developed methods for building natural language query interfaces, initially restricted to just one database, and later made "transportable" to many different applications. The further development of this technology into commercial software products will be discussed and illustrated by a survey of several current products, including both micro-computer NL systems and those offered on higher-performance machines. The qualities a user should look for in a NL interface will be considered, both in terms of linguistic capabilities and general ease of use. Finally, some of the remaining "hard problems" that current technology has not yet solved in a satisfactory way will be discussed. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at people who are not well acquainted with natural language interfaces and who would like to learn about 1) the capabilities of current systems, and 2) the technology that underlies these capabilities. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Carole D. Hafner is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. After receiving her Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan, she spent several years as a Staff Scientist at General Motors Research Laboratories working on the development of a natural language interface to databases. ABSTRACT This tutorial will survey the use of logic to represent the meaning of utterances and the extra-linguistic knowledge needed to produce and interpret utterances in natural-language processing systems. Problems to be discussed in meaning representation include quantification, propositional attitudes, comparatives, mass terms and plurals, tense and aspect, and event sentences and adverbials. Logic-based methods (unification) for systematic specification of the correspondence between syntax and semantics in natural language processing systems will also be touched on. In the discussion of the representation of extra-linguistic knowledge, special attention will be devoted to the role played by knowledge of speakers' and hearers' mental states (particularly their knowledge and beliefs) in the generation and interpretation of utterances and logical formalisms for representing and reasoning about knowledge of those states. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at implementors of natural-language processing systems and others interested in logical approaches to the problems of meaning representation and knowledge representation in such systems. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Robert C. Moore is a staff scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International. Since joining SRI in 1977, Dr. Moore has carried out research on natural-language processing, knowledge representation, automatic deduction, and nonmonotonic reasoning. In 1986-87 he was the first director of SRI's Computer Science Research Centre in Cambridge, England. Dr. Moore received his PhD from MIT in 1979. ABSTRACT The central problems faced by a Machine Translation (MT) research project are 1) the design and implementation of automatic natural language analyzers and generators that manipulate morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge; and 2) the design, acquisition and maintenance of dictionaries and grammars. Since a short-term goal (or even medium term goal) of building a system that performs fully automated machine translation of unconstrained text is not feasible, an MT project must carefully constrain its objectives. This tutorial will describe the knowledge and processing requirements for an MT system. It will present and analyze the set of design choices for MT projects including distinguishing features such as long-term/short-term, academic/commercial, fully/partially automated, direct/transfer/interlingua, pre-/post-/interactive editing. The knowledge acquisition needs of an MT system, with an emphasis on interactive knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate the task of compiling the various dictionaries for an MT system will be discussed. In addition, expectations, possibilities and prospects for immediate application of machine translation technology will be considered. Finally, a brief survey of MT research and development work around the world will be presented. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at at a general audience that could include both students looking for an application area and testbed for their ideas in natural language processing and people contemplating starting an MT or machine-aided translation project. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Sergei Nirenburg, Research Scientist at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University, holds an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from Kharkov State University, USSR, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He has published in the fields of parsing, generation, machine translation, knowledge representation and acquisition, and planning. Dr. Nirenburg is Editor of the journal Computers and Translation. SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Conference Committee General Chair Norman Sondheimer, USC/Information Sciences Institute Secretary-Treasurer Donald E. Walker, Bell Communications Research Program Committee Bruce Ballard (Chair), AT&T Bell Laboratories Madeleine Bates, BBN Laboratories Tim Finin, Unisys Ralph Grishman, New York University Carole Hafner, Northeastern University George Heidorn, IBM Corporation Paul Martin, SRI International Graeme Ritchie, University of Edinburgh Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments Tutorials Martha Palmer, Unisys Local Arrangements Jonathan Slocum, MCC (Chair) Elaine Rich, MCC Exhibits and Demonstrations Kent Wittenburg, MCC Publicity Jeffrey Hill and Brenda Nashawaty, Artificial Intelligence Corporation ------------------------------ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Reply to James H. Coombs `ACH Text markup' message (109 lines) Date: 6 December 1987, 18:22:13 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 510 (510) Contibuted by Robert Amsler (I'll make this reply public from the start since Nancy Ide already had to double-back and make her's public afterwards. It may, however, become a suitable topic for a more extended private discussion between those with an interest in text encoding standards.) As Nancy already noted, SGML is the most likely model which will be used for the Humanities Text Standard, however there was considerable concern at the meeting by the French delegation about the workshop endorsing SGML as the official standard to be emulated. In view of that, it was deemed essential to avoid specifically saying this in favor of the broader statement that we'd attempt to be compatible with applicable existing standards where possible. Specifically, this also includes character transliteration standards--which are a considerable part of a humanities text standard's encoding problems. (I can hardly wait for ISO to adopt an official standard for encoding Egyptian hieroglyphics in ASCII!) I would also however like to make a strong statement that from a computational perspective there is no need for any one format to be the only one used. What is needed is that any format must be fully documented and an information-preserving transformation of the contents of any approved standard format. This was captured in the statement that the standard would be an `interchange' format. This does beg the issue of how the transformation takes place, i.e. a program needs to be written or capable of being run on the `other' format and on hardware available to the recipient of the data, but it is important to note that an SGML-like format may appear as very formidable to users who believe they will have to type in all the special codes manually--whereas a `keyboarding' format may be just as faithful in representing the information without undo burden to the typist. I'm sure you will agree to this since your excellent CACM article notes that one of the most overlooked forms of markup is the use of traditional English punctuation and spacing conventions. Returning to your message's points, your 4th point seems to me to be exceptionally good and something that we did not explicitly get to in the Poughkeepsie meeting, i.e., ``4) There should be no attempt at establishing a "closed" tag set. The current AAP SGML application allows for definition of new tags, but it does not support such definition in a practical way. The consequence is that people will use "list items," for example, when they should be using "line of poetry." Within these guidelines, it can only be healthy to provide a list of tags that people should choose from when tagging certain entities. The point of this is that we cannot predict what textual elements will be of significance for what researchers. We have to allow for the discovery of textual elements that no one has categorized previously. At the same time, there is no point in having 30 different tags for "line of poetry." The guidelines should make clear that DESCRIPTION is paramount and that the use of particular tags is secondary.'' I think the means by which this latter goal, of not having 30 equivalent tags for the same text element, is to be handled will be an important role of the text encoding standards subcommittees. What it strikes me are needed here are the database concept of a `data dictionary' to provide definitions for all the `tags' and the information-science concept of a tangled hierarchical thesaurus of tags (terms) including the 4 major categories of `broader tag' (BT), `narrower tag' (NT), `related tag' (RT) and `use instead' (XT ?) type of pointers. Thus the standards subcommittees should begin work on a thesaurus of tags which defines each tag's intended domain of text entities, its relationship to other more general and more specific tags as well as related tags and tags which should be used instead of a given tag. This means, for example, that in tagging a text feature, one could use a generic tag such as `paragraph' or a more specific tag such as `summation paragraph' and that an author would have a guidebook of established possible tags that would tell them the options and what qualifications a text object had to have in order to qualify for the use of such a tag. I do think it is important to allow for arbitrarily deep extensions of the tagging, but any standard will have failed if every author has to resort to inventing their own tags to encode text. Note, this is still independent of the issue of `required minimum tags' in that the dictionary and thesaurus of tags only tell the user how a tag should be used and what alternatives exist to its use--they do not say that a tag must (or must not) be used (except in the case of the `use instead' pointers that attempt to avoid tags being used ambiguously). My model of what such a Thesaurus should look like is the ERIC Thesaurus of Descriptors. Robert A. Amsler Bellcore 435 South St., Morristown, NJ 07960 (201) 829-4278 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The CD-ROM debate: erasable optical disks Date: 7 December 1987, 09:40:52 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 511 (511) Contributed by Sterling Bjorndahl Speaking personally, I am not going to run out and buy a CD-ROM drive for my home computer until we see what the next generation of laser technology is going to look like in terms of cost and performance. The latest I have heard on the topic is on page 12 of the December _Byte_: "Matsushita, the large Japanese parent company of Panasonic, ... will deliver a prototype of an erasable optical disk drive next year, probably in the third quarter, a company spokesperson said. It will probably be competing with products from Sony, Philips, and Kodak. Matsushita has invested heavily in the phase-change scheme, so that's probably the technology that will be incorporated in the drive it brings to market. In phase-change technology, molecules of tellurium suboxide change from an amorphous noncrystalline state to a crys- talline state and back again, depending on the type of laser beam ap- plied. But the company is also studying other approaches, including magneto-optical (which Sony is using) and dye-polymer technologies. One hurdle all the pioneers of erasable optical drives will have to leap is the slowness of the units, caused partially by the size of the optical disk head, which is much bigger than a head in a typical magnetic drive." CD-ROM is available now, with texts that I want to use, so I am glad that I have access to a system that can use that technology (Ibycus). And I think Bob Kraft has listed some excellent reasons for using CD-ROM technology where appropriate. However, I don't want to spend my own money on something that will limit my flexibility in the future. Thus my caution, until I can determine whether the new technology will be practical for me. I remember reading an article on erasable optical drives in a popular m aga- zine within recent months. I thought it was Scientific American, but I can't locate the article among the issues in my magazine rack. Does anyone else know of it? I believe it was on magneto-optical technology, and I remember it mentioning data densities on the order of current CD-ROM tech- nology rather than the current WORM technology (which seems to be worse than half as dense as CD-ROM). Sterling Bjorndahl Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont Graduate School Claremont, California From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Research opportunity (58 lines) Date: 7 December 1987, 13:23:51 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 512 (512) Contributed by E S Atwell Dear fellow "Computational Humanities" researcher, Do you know of any young graduates interested in corpus-based computational research on the English language? I have an opportunity for an aspiring researcher to come to Leeds for a 'taster', to work on a large collaborative project. I would be very grateful if you could forward the following details to any potential candidates you know of. Thank you for your help, Eric Steven Atwell Centre for Computer Analysis of Language and Speech AI Division, School of Computer Studies Artificial Intelligence Group, School of Computer Studies, Leeds University COMMUNAL is a large collaborative research project aiming to develop a robust Natural Language interface to Expert Systems, allowing access through natural English dialogue. This will require software to analyse and parse the user's input; convert it into the internal Knowledge Representation formalism; infer an appropriate response or solution; and generate output in ordinary English. At Leeds University, we will develop a powerful parser, based on a Systemic- Functional model of English grammar. The other partners in the project are: UWIST (project coordinators), the Ministry of Defence, ICL, and Longman. The appointee will be principally involved in designing, building, testing and documenting the parser software, using POPLOG prolog on a Sun Workstation. She/he will be expected to liaise with and learn from other researchers in the Centre for Computer Analysis of Language and Speech (CCALAS) and related research groups at Leeds and elsewhere; there will be opportunities for travel, to coordinate research with other partners, and to present results at international conferences. The post is for a fixed term of 18 months in the first instance, although the project may continue to a Second Phase. Starting salary is to be 8185 p.a., with an expected 7% increase in March 1988 and a further increment later. We require an appointment as soon as possible; please contact Eric Atwell via JANET (eric@uk.ac.leeds.ai) or EARN/BITNET (eric%leeds.ai@ac.uk), or by phone on (+44 532) 431751 ext.6119 or 6307 for further details of the post and how to apply; I can also give some idea of cost of living, housing etc for applicants outside the UK. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Coombs' ``Markup: On Requirements'' message Date: 8 December 1987, 09:34:02 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 513 (513) While I have great sympathy for the goals expressed by James H. Coombs in this message, I have no optimism about the methods suggested to achieve those goals. The issue here is one of money and the existing source of such funding would be the same source of funding which currently supports research in the humanities. If we propose that a computer archive in the humanities should have all these desirable properties, then unless a new source of funding is provided, it would have to take funds away from other types of humanities research. The alternative would be to create a self-funded archive which would have to derive funding from the sale of copies of its machine-readable data. This seems possible, perhaps funded by a surcharge something like that of the current copyright clearance center to whom most libraries send payments when they make photocopies of magazine and journal articles. However such a center would have to also be prepared to legally sue users of copyrighted data who did not pay for their copies. I have no trouble with this since as Howard Webber recently said, if we interfere with the flow of funding back to the creators of intellectual property, we will eventually cut off the funds to develop such works. At present most texts in the humanities in machine-readable form are either the result of funded research or `donations' of humanists time. This creates a poorman's archive. The real owners of the bulk of the humanities texts not available are the publishers, who routinely destroy the machine-readable works they print because of a variety of excuses similar to those of monks burning manuscript pages to light their candles. We need to form an archive in which major humanities publishers would be eager to deposit their machine-readable tapes--for the purpose of generating additional revenue from their computational use. I do not think attempting to Prussianize either the volunteer humanities data enterers nor the existing marginally-funded archives would be a very good idea. Robert A. Amsler Bellcore Morristown, NJ 07960 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Encoding, a reply to James H. Coombs comments Date: 8 December 1987, 09:38:34 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 514 (514) [This is a reply to some of James H. Coombs comments on Nancy Ide's message] Coombs writes: ``A minor philosophical point, I guess: I don't think that we CAN know our needs fully. We need standards that accommodate needs that cannot be predicted today. The practical consequence of this observation, which I'm sure Nancy would agree with, is that one should seek a "productive" system instead of a system that satisfies everything on a list, and one should not spend a lot of time developing the list.'' Once upon a time I was doing a survey of the keywords and descriptors used to characterize articles in the Communications of the ACM. The keywords were author-supplied terms that described their article's content; the descriptors were selected by the author's from a pre-specified set of similar content descriptors supplied by the ACM. What I discovered was that as I collected more and more instances of keywords created by the authors, there was no closure whatsoever. The set of terms just kept expanding and there were large numbers of keywords which only one author used, and then only for one article. This is how I see the problem of the selection of tags for text entities in documents. That is, if the system is completely open and `productive' there will be little commonality between author's selections--whereas if the authors are offered a wide-range of approved tags to select from, then they will manage to find tags which meet their needs. ------- ``What are "multiple parallel hierarchies"? I can guess, but I want to be sure that I understand the problem. In a most documents, we have, for example, pragmatic and syntactic hierarchies.'' The term was used at the Vassar meeting by David Barnard, I believe. The statement was in reference to the difficulty of software developers in providing software capable of interpreting a document written in the full SGML standard and as far as I'm aware there is still no full-SGML-capable software available. I assumed that he was referring to the potential division of a work into OVERLAPPING tagged segments, i.e. it would be possible to have a work with tags which ended inside the span of other still running open tags, e.g., ... ... <\line> ... <\foreign-word> ... <\sentence> <\line> The problem here is that some entity would be broken into two parts if any entity were extracted. ``What is the practical value of a metalanguage that generates all markup languages? I would think that it would be so abstract as to be of no value.'' Who said `generates'; what we were discussing was a meta-language which `parses' all markup languages--a sort of least upper bound markup language. The thought was that we needed to accomodate all reasonable existing texts with markup information already in them. We weren't intending to require existing texts with carefully worked out markup schemes to be redone in a scheme which would offer nothing new to their markings other than a different way of noting the same information. However, your next point is well-taken... ``I suspect that this is part of the goal of salvaging work that has been inadequately coded.'' Actually we were thinking of salvaging work that had been ADEQUATELY coded before a standard was available. Rather than requiring every such work to be recoded in a new format, it was hoped that the new format could accept the existing works as is. Whether that is possible or not, as Nancy stated, is an open question since we haven't yet collected the documentation for existing collections of text and their formats. ``I believe that we will be better off if we worry less about the past and plan more for the future. I suppose that it's true that publishers have typesetting tapes in their basements, and that we could use those tapes.'' Actually, no they don't. They ordinarily don't get the tapes from the printers and if they did would only get the last version on tape before the final manual cut-and-paste corrections. Publishers thus routinely ignore and discard this phototypesetting data as a useless intermediate step and save the `valuable' printing plates instead. One reason is there is no common format in which to save the data for reuse. Each printer has their own variant of the hardware/software. However, regardless of that, the next is very true. ``I think that we have to accept that those tapes are of little value until someone converts the coding to descriptive markup. .... Whether it's a dictionary or a literary text, we can expect that inadequate coding will cause considerable work for anyone attempting to use the database. A metalanguage that includes procedural markup as well as descriptive markup will not help in such a case, because one still has to map procedural markup onto descriptive markup in order to be able to work with meaningful entities (definition, paragraph, etc.). Since procedural markup tends to be performed somewhat arbitrarily and does not normally provide a one-to-one relationship between entity and markup, there is no metalanguage that will help a researcher perform the necessary conversions. You are mixing two things here. First, while it is true one cannot go from a typesetting tape to a descriptive markup in one step, it doesn't necessarily follow that the procedural markup is useless. A case in point is dictionaries. There IS NO descriptive markup standard for dictionary entries (I'm working on developing one with a number of other computational lexicologists, but none exists right now), yet the phototypesetting tapes of dictionaries are very useful to creating a descriptive markup of their contents. Headwords are typeset in boldface, possibly outdented, certainly starting new lines; parts of speech are in italic, pronunciations are in special fonts for their phonetic characters, usually enclosed in (,)'s or similar delimiters. Etymologies prefer [,]'s. Labels are in italics, sense numbers in boldface, definition texts in Roman type, with examples sometimes offset in <,>'s and sometimes in italics. All of these are positionally context-sensitive within the dictionary entry. Their descriptive nature can usually be unambiguously determined from the positional and font information on a phototypesetting tape. It would be a genuine aid to the people who today decode such phototypesetting tapes if they were in only ONE procedural markup language. At present they are in innumerably many different markup languages. ``What we really need is a sensible and dynamic standard. I don't think that anyone would argue that that standard should be anything other than descriptively based. Since we are going to have to convert texts to descriptive markup in order to use them anyway, why not just develop the standard and convert as necessary. Trying to save the past is just going to retard development.'' The reason is that ther conversion is going to have to be done fairly often UNTIL a standard for both procedural and descriptive markup is available. We have no future without the publisher's adopting a descriptive markup eventually, but until they do, we have no sensible future in hand-entry of published books when some electronic typesetting format is available. Keyboarding the OED, for instance, took several MILLION dollars! If the typesetting data had been available in machine readable form, it would probably have reduced the effort by a factor of ten. Again... Robert A. Amsler Bellcore Morristown, NJ 07960 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Encoding schemes, text archive (reply to Coombs) Date: 8 December 1987, 09:46:13 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 515 (515) Contributed by "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" James Coombs has suggested I post my reply to his comments on text encoding. This is it; I have also appended a note on the phrase 'multiple incompatible hierarchies' which seems to be unclear. ---------- Many thanks for your note about text encoding and the ACH/ACL/ALLC initiative in particular. I agree with you in every detail, as far as I can see, and will just try to clarify a couple of things quickly, which can be discussed at length later. 1 in preparing for the Vassar meeting, the ACH committee on text encoding had come up with a plan similar to the base + extensions that you suggest. The basic idea of user extensions was universally accepted, but the word 'require' was complete anathema to a number of people at the Vassar meeting. These were (a) those in charge of large existing text archives, who wanted to make very sure the guidelines would not turn into something their funding agencies would eventually require (no single quotes here!) them to conform to; and (b) some people worried about the possibility that funding agencies and their reviewers might use the 'requirements' of any guidelines to refuse funding to anyone who deviates from the required minimal tagging, even for adequate scholarly reasons. It was agreed to 'recommend' certain minimal tags (the verse paragraphs of Milton would be a good example) for newly encoded texts, but consensus could not be reached on any more than that. This was a disappointment to me, but appears on reflection to affect not the structure of the guidelines but only the choice of words to describe it. In any case, there will be a fairly extensive pre-defined tag set, I expect, but not a closed one. 2 SGML should have been mentioned explicitly in the closing document, but at the last minute some delegates objected that such details were too low-level to deserve mention in such a statement of principles. The objection was presented as being stylistic, but may have been partly substantive. In any case, the planning group at Vassar were unwilling to commit themselves to SGML without reservation, because it was not clear how well SGML proper could handle the multiple incompatible hierarchies necessary for a lot of textual research, and some objected to what they said was SGML's verbosity. The SGML supporters did succeed in persuading the group that SGML should be used, unless experience showed it simply could not. (We know full well experience will show no such thing.) Whether we try to formulate formal document type definitions or not remains to be seen, but given the unregulated habits of the texts we study, cleanly defined hierarchies of the sort DTDs are designed for won't be very easy or do anyone much good. (The OED people said that they use SGML syntax but have never bothered with a DTD and never missed one. The variety of entries in the dictionary, they said, is such that a type definition couldn't be written in advance anyway, and written after the fact would just be an inventory of the various forms of entries they had empirically found.) In any case, we are hoping not to re-invent SGML. In fact, some people were very interested in attempting to use SGML for the metalanguage required to describe existing encoding schemes, but I am uncertain whether SGML itself will be useful in defining the syntax and semantics of procedural markup or of old card-oriented encodings with author / play / act / scene / line references encoded in columns 73-80. But perhaps when I finally get my hands on a copy of the standard itself, I'll find out it can do all of that too. ------- [ end of extract from original note ] ----- HUMANISTs will be very interested in the article Coombs et al. have just published in the Communications of the ACM, and I encourage anyone interested in encoding texts or in using encoded texts to read it. Further clarifications and suggestions: 3 'multiple parallel hierarchies' (Ide) and 'multiple incompatible hierarchies' (above) seem not to be immediately clear to all. We Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Bibliography or bibliographer needed (40 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 09:58:27 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 516 (516) Contributed by "Rosanne G. Potter" I am editing a book on Literary Computing and Literary Criticism containing essays by Richard Bailey, Don Ross, Jr., John Smith, Paul Fortier, C. Nancy Ide, Ruth Sabol, myself and others. I am looking for someone who already has, in a fairly advanced state, a bibliography on this subject, or who is an experienced bibliographer and can put one togehter in the month of Jan and Feb (the latest). Anyone who meets either of these descriptions or can suggest the name of someone who could fulfill this need, please let me know. The book is completely written, a copy could be sent immediately to anyone seriously interested in the project. The current situation is that Art Evans at U of Penn Press wants to publish the book is, in fact, planning to get it into the Fall List, but we are both waiting on two readers reports--the UPENN board is not as enthusiastic about the possibility of a collocation between LIT CRIT and Computing as either Art or I wish--so they must be convinced by the readers reports. Whether Penn publishes it or not, I have little doubt that I will be able to find a suitable publisher--though not likely one who will publish it as quickly--and that a bibliography will be required by some reader or board soon. (I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.) Rosanne G. Potter Department of English Iowa State University Ross Hall 203 (515) 294-2180 (Main Office) (515) 294-4617 (My office) (515) 232-4473 (Home) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text archives, centers (92 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 10:06:53 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 517 (517) Contributed by "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" Jim Coombs asks whether a North American text archive would get us anything we can't already get from Oxford, and if so how it should be funded and organized. I think it can, and this is why: 1 First, note: We *don't* need a North American text archive just as an archive or text repository. In this area, Oxford's work can hardly be faulted. They take everything, they work hard to document everything, they distribute as freely as their donors allow them to. 2 A North American center, though, could and should be set up to be funded by a number of universities. No one university in North America is likely to fund the kind of public service Oxford performs, let alone anything more. But ongoing funding from many schools could make it possible for a center to do some things that the Oxford Archive just does not have the funding or staff to do. 3 A North American center does not (thank heaven) have to compete with Oxford; it would make far better sense to work in cooperation. Oxford (in the person of Lou Burnard), it pleases me to say, agrees. 4 A center should provide a locus for cooperation in all the areas where universities now must pay large amounts of money to re-invent the wheel. That is: a creating new machine-readable texts (preferably according to some rational plan, as well as on demand) b documenting existing machine-readable texts both for users and for collecting libraries -- that is, the center should provide a basis for cooperative library cataloguing of machine-readable texts and the distribution of the catalogue records to the library community c upgrading existing machine-readable texts, converting them to a standard format and checking (or spot-checking) their validity d distributing all these texts to scholars e training of users and of computer advisors/consultants, via summer seminars, short-term grants to individuals to work in residence on their projects (in funding-agency terms, acting as a re-granting agency, I think this is called) f (possibly) assisting software development, either by helping establish and encourage cooperation among university-based developers or by performing development work of its own. (Frankly, I'm a little unsure how useful or feasible this is, but it's a point one often hears, so I mention it.) This is not an exhaustive list. It reflects what I know happens at Oxford, Toronto, Penn, BYU and such places. Also what ICPSR (the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) does now. 5 Funding -- it seems to me the universities should pay for this center, just as they do for ICPSR. We don't want just a consortium of humanities-computing centers, because many universities don't choose to support humanities computing that way. We want services to include enough library services that at least some university or college libraries will want to join. We want data distribution to be important enough that local data archives will want their schools to join. We want enough emphasis on humanities research that humanities departments will lobby for membership, enough benefits to computing consultants/support staff that computer centers will be in favor too. Who pays the membership fee will obviously depend on the internal politics of the institution, but the membership should be by institution. (Obviously it also must be possible to support the needs of independent scholars. But arrangements to that end must not allow schools to reap the benefits of having a center while evading the costs of supporting it.) The motive to join must, I think, be partly altruistic, partly financial. By joining such a consortium a school can help support humanities research in general, and get an awful lot of data free. Not joining, then, must mean the data costs money. It is not hard to figure that a consortium membership can be far cheaper than acquiring a scanner, paying maintenance on it, and running it within the school. Joining must also be preferable to buying the data from the consortium. 6 A center like this could support text-encoding standards in ways I think Oxford would find difficult. Without some deep changes in its funding, the Oxford Archive can't hope to convert its holdings to a new standard. A new center could make that part of its raison d'etre. 7 Obviously, there is no need to limit the membership of a consortium such as I have just described to North America. But I think that's where the need is, research in Europe being organized on different lines. 8 This concept of a consortium-supported general-purpose archive and center contrasts sharply with that of cooperation among humanities computing centers and with that of a set of regional or discipline-based centers, which have been propounded in recent years from some quarters. I hope those who prefer those plans to this will be persuaded to describe to use how they would prefer to see things organized. That would be extremely useful to us all. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: In reply to Robert Amsler on ACH Text Markup Date: 8 December 1987, 10:11:52 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 518 (518) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Robert says: I would also however like to make a strong statement that from a computational perspective there is no need for any one format to be the only one used. What is needed is that any format must be fully documented and an information-preserving transformation of the contents of any approved standard format. This was captured in the statement that the standard would be an `interchange' format. First, I am confused by the word "format." I would like to see something more specific, such as "markup language." Perhaps ACH does intend something broader than markup language though. I need a definition to know that I know what is being referred to. Does "format" here include things like the location of markup? Microsoft Word, I am told, stores markup at the end of the file. Well, that seems to me on further thought to be a markup language with something like a postfix syntax. While it's true that we can process files with a variety of markup languages, we need more than full documentation. We have full documentation of the procedural markup language for Waterloo SCRIPT, for example, but that markup language does not provide us with the information that we need; instead of telling researchers that an entity is a "verse paragraph", it tells Waterloo SCRIPT what procedures to perform at a particular point in the text stream. Perhaps "information preserving" is intended to capture this notion somewhat. Well, the information must be encoded in the text in the first instance before we can preserve it, and we want researchers to encode the information when they enter the text. An "interchange format"? Again, I'm a little confused, or I'm not convinced that primary needs are being addressed. We have standards for document interchange that preserve nothing but formatting information, e.g., font changes. If the primary instance of a text encodes nothing more than formatting information, then we will have information preservation, but the information that we preserve will not be the information that we really need. We will know how to print a text, but we won't know (computationally) what the individual entities are. I imagine that Robert and others agree with everything that I have said. What I am asking for is more precision and, above all, a commitment to descriptive markup. In addition, I am asking for some restrictions on the markup languages. Specifically, markup should be contiguous with the elements that are being marked up; markup should appear in the text stream. Yes, we can process files that store all of the (electronic) markup at the beginning or at the end, or part here and part there. But why should we invite this complexity? Can we reasonably expect every scholar to have access to programmers who can convert many formats into one? Or can we reasonably expect every scholar to have a separate concordance program, a separate retrieval program, etc., for every possible markup langauge? or for every markup language that is used in one of the texts that the scholar needs? While it may be convenient in the short term for someone to sit down and type in Microsoft Word, our acceptance of Word documents would be very expensive to many people for many years. What is the value of a standard that allows this? it is important to note that an SGML-like format may appear as very formidable to users who believe they will have to type in all the special codes manually--whereas a `keyboarding' format may be just as faithful in representing the information without undo burden to the typist. I'm sure you will agree to this since your excellent CACM article notes that one of the most overlooked forms of markup is the use of traditional English punctuation and spacing conventions. If SGML appears formidable to people, let's educate them, and let's develop software that minimizes the effort. Currently popular software seems to minimize markup effort, but it fails to record sufficient markup. Unaware of the deficiencies of their software, people say that they want more fonts, for example, and that they are not interested in descriptive markup. We need to make it clear to Microsoft, Dragonfly, and others that we need descriptive markup. I think that we want to stay away from the word "keyboarding." One of the complaints has been that people do not want to "keyboard" markup. So, if we use "keyboarding" for the act of performing scribal markup (punctuational and presentational) but not for the act of typing descriptive (and referential) markup, then we invite confusion. Clearly Robert is referring to the use of punctuation, and he must also be referring to the use of presentational markup (e.g., skipping space between paragraphs). Both of these forms of markup have deficiencies that descriptive (and referential) markup do not have. Above all, they are ambiguous; in addition, they are often much harder to parse. First, ambiguity. Periods are used to end sentences and they are used to indicate that a string of characters is an abbreviation (Mr.). Perhaps even worse, the same character is used to indicate that a word is possessive and to indicate the end of an imbedded quotation, e.g.: a) She told him, "Do not say 'dogs' house' anymore." How much time do we want to waste on developing algorithms to parse this markup? Why not use (b) instead? b) She told him, Do not say dogs' house anymore. Software can easily display (a) when it has recorded (b), but it cannot easily generate (b) when it has recorded (a). Of course it is easier for most of us to enter (a) than it is to enter (b); it is always easier to do half the job. Once we start accepting this responsibility, we will start convincing software developers to support our needs, and entering (b) will not require much more than entering (a) does now. Why would anyone want to record (b)? Well, they might want to print the text with open and close quotation marks. They might want to study all of the quotations, or all of the imbedded quotations. They might want to study the use of possessives. And so on. Similar problems occur with presentational markup. Yes, if we have a one-to-one mapping between presentational markup and text element, then presentational markup records all of the information that descriptive markup does. We don't really need tags for each line of poetry in *Paradise Lost*, for example. We need know only that each line of poetry is terminated with '\n', for example. There is no conflict with SGML here, however, since SGML supports this method of marking up texts. In fact, in such a case we don't really have presentational markup at all, we have descriptive markup; the markup serves not to enhance the presentation but to identify that a stream of text is a line of poetry. You also load things a little with the phrase "undue burden," Robert. In part, I am arguing that there is a "due burden" that scholars must accept if we are to get anywhere in this whole project of using computers to assist our scholarship directly. Part of that "due burden" is the proper encoding of texts. In addition, I think that you over emphasize the costs of entering descriptive markup. You do so partially by implicating that presentational markup is easier to select and perform. We argue in our article that presentational markup is considerably harder to select, and that there is no pretheoretical motivation for believing that either form of markup is easier to perform than the other. In addition, you seem to classify markup as presentational whenever it does not consist of tags. Under our functional definition of descriptive markup, at least, the markup that you are talking about is actually descriptive markup. In any case, the sort of markup that you are talking about is provided for under the SGML standard. I thank you for your kind words on our article. Our next article will help clarify the distinctions that we make and how we are making them. For the present, it seemed more important to make people aware of the advantages of descriptive markup. I hope that my response does not seem overly microscopic. I find again and again that conceptual confusion leads to unnecessary practical problems. In order for scholars to decide what form of markup to use, they must know clearly what the competing forms of markup are and what each form has to offer. Finally, your discussion of thesauri and tag sets is interesting. I'm not sure that I have anything to add to it. Need to think about it more. Cheers! --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: archival politics (50 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 10:18:46 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 519 (519) Contributed by Lou Burnard [This message was delayed as a result of finger trouble on my part - I sent it to the wrong node - LB] " If I can't count on a text from a particular archive to meet my needs, what is my motivation for bothering with that archive; and what is the motivation for the archive's existence? I certainly would not want to see it supported by public funds." (JAZBO on Friday) This is fighting talk! The only defence I can offer is that a community gets the Archive it deserves. If you guys don't have the sense to agree on a common language, why should the humble archivist be expected to do it? On the contrary, I could argue that I had a responsibility to preserve accurately the current state of affairs as a dire warning to future generations. I expect librarians would like to insist that all publishers produced books to the same dimensions too (makes the shelving so much easier dontcha know). I expect there were even once some librarians who did so insist. But I doubt whether they won many friends. There is a self-evident crying need "to set and maintain standards". But it has to come from the community of users. Once a standard has been defined, it is possible for an archive to indicate whether or to what degree a text is conformant to it, and that is certainly something every user has a right to expect of an archive. Once a standard exists it is also reasonable to expect an archive to seek ways of converting and enhancing nonconformant texts. But I don't think a general purpose deposit archive has any right to decide what is or isn't acceptable until such standards have been defined. After all, most of the texts we have WERE useful to someone, at least once. Finally, may I with the greatest deference point out that an archive is emphatically not the same as a publisher. Publishers have to please their public or they go under. An archive is a mirror of its users. If all that its users wish to share is rubbish, reserving the best quality stuff for themselves, then the archive will be full of rubbish. It's up to you. Lou Burnard Oxford Text Archive From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Archives Date: 8 December 1987, 10:33:48 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 520 (520) Contributed by dartvax!psc90!jdg@ihnp4 (Dr. Joel Goldfield) Regarding Jim Coombs questions concerning Michael Sperberg-McQueen's queries and comments, having a text archive at Oxford but not in North America as well seems adequate if a pledge is made by Oxford to supply these texts at a reasonable price (to be determined) and reasonably quickly. The only negative aspect I can think of at the moment if these conditions are met is that it would certainly be costly to download them via transatlantic (satellite) communication. I would hope that telephone/ modem linkage to receive this information would be cost-effective and that we wouldn't be limited to sending CD-ROM's or magnetic tape by mail. --Joel D. Goldfield Plymouth State College (NH, USA) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Analysis of papyrological mss Date: 8 December 1987, 10:38:11 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 521 (521) Contributed by Jack Abercrombie In the interest of improving a program for papyrologists, the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts is willing to make available to colleagues a preliminary version of a program for mss analysis. Manuscripts first must be digitized and stored in a TIFF format, a common file structure used in desktop publishing. The program allows one to enhance the digitized image on an EGA screen. If you have serious interest in assisting in the development work, we would be willing to send you the source code. You would have to have access to a digitizer. WRITE TO: JACKA @ PENNDRLS. John R. Abercrombie Assistant Dean for Computing, Director of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (University of Pennsylvania) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Coombs' ``Markup: On Requirements'' Date: 8 December 1987, 10:44:17 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 522 (522) Contributed by Richard Giordano I really can't see what all the fuss is about. If people are serious about creating both national and international standards for data "markups", a data archive, and such related issues, I don't see why we don't work in close collaboration with at least these three organizations: The American Library Association; the Library of Congress; and the Research Libraries Group. They have the resources, know-how, and institutional connections to develop such standards, communication formats, and the like--and they have a track record in this regard that extends back over twenty years. Someone mentioned somewhere here that ALA was "a conservative bastion". I have no idea what he means by this. Traditionally, ALA and LC have both taken the lead in the scholarly world in providing machine-readable information. The technical problems that LC has addressed have been fundamental to data processing. Rich From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Sending messages to HUMANIST, an editorial plea (30 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 10:47:21 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 523 (523) Dear Colleagues: The new arrangement, whereby I intercept all messages to HUMANIST, seems to have worked well so far, but about one thing some confusion has arisen. Messages apparently intended for distribution sometimes are sent to me directly, that is, to mccarty@utorepas.bitnet, rather than to HUMANIST, i.e., humanist@utoronto.bitnet. My life would occasionally be made simpler if you would all adopt the convention of sending messages for distribution only to humanist@utoronto, even if you want my opinion on whether or not they should be distributed. (In that case, put a note to that effect in the message; I can easily delete the note.) If you want to write to me *as editor* of HUMANIST, then please send your message to mccarty@utorepas. Finally, beware of the distinction between UTORONTO, where HUMANIST lives, and UTOREPAS, where I electronically reside. Thanks very much for making HUMANIST a lively place. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A North-American text archive and service centre (80 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 12:29:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 524 (524) Contributed by Ian Lancashire Michael Sperberg-McQueen argues for a national North American text archive and service centre, supported by a consortium of colleges and universities. He contrasts this to a consortium of humanities computing centres, which (because it involves fewer institutions) can be perceived as serving only a small percentage of faculty and students. He also challenges someone to dispute this. I'm suspicious of any proposal to centralize computing needs about one data-processing shop. Competition is the essence of being American, isn't it? The more heads at work on a problem, the better chance of finding an answer, or ideally something completely new that we didn't expect in the first place. Most of us have just won the fight for personal computing equipment and software: resources for which we're beholding to no-one because they are in the marketplace, available for a price that's affordable even to students (or should I say even to faculty). Hasn't centralized computing lost the war in most universities? Do we want to perpetuate it on a national scale? The more people creating text archives, the better, because what we need are specialized collections from the scholarly editors who have previously worked only with paper books. Will the research projects set up to edit works by individual authors trust a central archive to do their work for them? Surely not. Look at the same argument for centralized software provision on a national scale. You can find clearinghouses of MS-DOS programs at North Carolina and at Wisconsin, and competitors emerge monthly from the woodwork. Our colleagues cannot agree to accept only one place for a software depository and distribution centre. They long ago rejected centralized software development because business proved it could produce far better work than any academic could. I'd rather buy my car from a car dealership that's in business for the money than from the government or from my engineering colleagues who occasionally build faster, more efficient cars for academic reasons. Few people in this field will argue with the idea of cooperation or consortia. The question Michael poses is, should the consortium be a collection of workers or a collection of customers? Probably a consortium of humanities computing centres and facilities would be a good beginning to to persuading our colleagues (wherever they are, inputting whoever) that a circle has more strength than a scattergram. We could at least help make the market for machine-readable texts profitable enough that companies now selling them (in the States, Electronic Text Corp. comes to mind) do well enough to subsidize (modestly, from royalties) further reliable machine-readable editing. [-30-] From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding (63 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 16:52:09 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 525 (525) Contributed by "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" Four quick observations on text encoding provoked by the recent barrage of postings: 1 Jim Coombs is right to praise the better information content of descriptive tagging, but still we should not require descriptive markup for *all* texts. Confronted with a printed book or a manuscript, there will be cases where we don't *know* whether something is a 'chapter' or a 'section'--what we know objectively might be that there is a page break followed by centered 14-point Baskerville saying XXXX, followed by 28 points of white space, followed by text. Everything more is interpretation. If we do have an interpretation, I'm in favor of encoding it in descriptive markup. But sometimes we won't and won't want to. The Carmina Burana manuscript is a classic example of this: it has been rebound and the gatherings re-arranged at least once, and different parts of the manuscript (and different hands) may well reflect multiple attempts to impose some (mutually incompatible) structure(s) on the collection. It would be sound practice to separate an editorial judgment on the intended structure(s) of the manuscript from a codicological description of the information that leads to that editorial judgment. The First Folio of Shakespeare, similarly, must be encoded with detailed typographic information if it is to be used for textual criticism, since the position of a word in the line, on the page, within the gathering, and within the volume, are all relevant to judging the authority of the word and its spelling. 2 Yes, the coming flood of machine-readable texts will overwhelm the material we now have in the machine, but still we must make our peace with (a) other (existing) markup schemes and (b) specifically presentational and procedural markup schemes. They will continue in use at least for a while and we must provide migration paths into the new scheme if we can. And markup restricted to font, etc. may be a useful first step in analysing any complex text, as dictionary work by Amsler and by Raimund Drewek at Zurich seems to show. 3 No, people should not have to have one concordance program for every encoding scheme in the world. (That is the current situation, though.) But many people do have large software systems built around specific formats. There is no need to cut them off, if we can develop one scheme capable of representing texts in those special formats without information loss. Given N different encoding schemes, such a universal scheme would reduce the translation problem from magnitude N * N to magnitude 2 * N. That, I believe, is a good reason to work for an "interchange format," and a good reason to accept in the interchange format whatever level of information is in the source. (Specific recommendations for minimal markup content shouldn't prevent this.) Eventually, we can always hope software developers will see that they might as well work directly with the interchange format rather than engaging in preliminary translation. But first we have to survive in the existing world dominated by existing schemes and non-schemes. 4 The library community is interested in machine-readable cataloguing data, and some of it also interested in collecting and cataloguing machine-readable data. But are they also interested in creating it? If so, then yes we should surely cooperate with them. But the only useful basis for any cooperation is for each group to be clear on its own point of view. And that is what all this fuss is about. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: more archival politics (this one shd run and run) Date: 8 December 1987, 16:57:06 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 526 (526) Contributed by Lou Burnard Disagreeing with Ian is not to be undertaken lightly. Nevertheless... "I'm suspicious of any proposal to centralize computing needs about one data-processing shop." An archive is not a data processing shop. "Hasn't centralized computing lost the war in most universities? Well, actually, no, it hasn't - not at those where it's been recognised that there's room for both private and public resources anyway. Some of us didnt even know there was a war going on... "The more people creating text archives, the better" Maybe we need a definition here. The more people creating *text resources* the better, of course. But the more centres competing to archive and secure those resources? I'm not so sure! How many libraries does your university need? Ours has far too many - and when it started thinking about the problems of integrating their various catalogues, it soon became apparent that no one library could impose its will on the others. So, guess what, a consortium emerged. A centralized quasi-official embodiment of the university's collective desire to bang the librarians' heads together until they started squeaking in tune. I'm all in favour of competition and the American Way (I want to see New York again too). But an archive has responsibilities which distinguish it very sharply from data producers or consumers. Recently, an organisation called the Knowledge Warehouse came into being here in the UK. It was funded by a consortium of UK publishers as a private company and also got a grant from the British Library. The idea was to set up some sort of archival service for publishers typesetting tapes etc. The scheme looked good on paper and had a lot of money behind it. But it doesnt seem to have been successful. The consensus amongst those I've talked to was that too few publishers wanted to play ball with an organisation which they at least perceived as a competitor. The moral I draw from this is that just as with books, there is a place for bookshops and private collections and state-owned and maintained great libraries, so is there a place for electronic text corpora and private collections of texts as well as for great archives. But it's important to distinguish them, because their roles and priorities are quite different. I wouldnt put a bookseller in charge of a library - nor would I expect a librarian to make much money in publishing. Lou From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Encoding Date: 8 December 1987, 19:01:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 527 (527) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" In reply to Robert Amsler's of 8 December 1987, 09:38:34 EST On closed vs. open tag sets, Robert concludes: This is how I see the problem of the selection of tags for text entities in documents. That is, if the system is completely open and `productive' there will be little commonality between author's selections--whereas if the authors are offered a wide-range of approved tags to select from, then they will manage to find tags which meet their needs. I would agree with Robert if I could bring myself to believe that we can develop a tag set that will genuinely meet our needs. The AAP tag set, for example, does not provide a "poetry quotation" tag; and we can expect scholars to realize that they can use a "list type" for poetry quotations in order to meet the immediate needs of 1) tagging an entity and 2) getting the entity formatted in a particular way. To some extent, we also have to say that this approach would meet many of the needs of descriptively marking up a text (as long as the chosen list type is used only for poetry quotations---with internal consistency). Some of the advantages of descriptive markup are lost in such an approach, however. Above all, the choice of the tag is not intuitive; both the original researcher and anyone using the text later will have to perform extra work to determine what "list type 2" is used for. I don't want to go on about this too long here, so let me just appeal to people's intuitions by saying that the tag "poetry quotation" has many advantages over the tag "list type 2". (None of these advantages are computational however; once a programmer determines that he/she should do X to "list type 2", the two tags have equal value.) If we discount the sort of advantages that I am referring to (discussed in our article---I'm not hedging), then we can solve the problem quite I used the following tags: E0 for paragraphs E1 for poetry quotations . . . E2347 for passages that allude to Genesis Of course, people will immediately say things like, "Let's all use for paragraphs." The many motivations that would cause such a response are the same motivations that cause us to provide

for paragraphs in the first instance. Because we cannot predict all entities that people need to mark up, we tend to throw our hands up in the air and say one of two things: 1) Let's just fake it from here on out and provide several list types. 2) We need to keep the tag set open. 3) [another approach that I am missing??] AAP has chosen approach (1) and then said go look at the standard if you really need something else. (The information for developing AAP-compliant documents with user-defined tags is not provided in the authors' documentation.) The deficiencies of approach (1) should be immediately clear to us when someone like the AAP ignores something so basic (to humanists) as poetry quotations. Moreover, if I am really analyzing a document, I will quickly run out of AAP list types. (And I don't think that I could twist things quite so far as to use a list type for my anyway.) Who is capable of providing a closed tag set that addresses these problems? Yes, the approach addresses them to some extent, but then what have we gained over ? Ok, so perhaps we remember to provide a tag for allusions. But what tags will we provide for post-structualist critics? For the next major critical theory? I agree that we should provide "a wide range of approved tags to select from," but I think it even more important to ensure that documents are marked up descriptively. (I recognize that I am close to equivocating in my use of "description." I am not fully satisfied with the functional definition that we offer in our article. Renear and I are working on this, and it gets complicated quickly. Basically, however, I want to say that is descriptive in some way that is not.) And, a posting just arrived from Michael Sperberg-McQueen, who argues that descriptive markup is not always appropriate. I suspect that Michael is saying that we sometimes need to describe the manuscript instead of the abstract text; in which case, we still want descriptive markup (i.e, we don't want Waterloo SCRIPT font instructions; we want something that says that X is/was in F font). In any case, I can hedge and conclude: insofar as a text is susceptible to description, it should be marked up descriptively and, further, that tag sets should be 1) open and 2) descriptive in this more intuitive sense of descriptive that favors over . --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: North American Archive(s) Issue Date: 8 December 1987, 19:06:03 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 528 (528) Contributed by amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) How about a Humanities Archive Network (HumAN) I think we have an opportunity to do something considerably greater than the Oxford Archive and in fact an obligation to do this because of the state of networking available in the USA. What I'd propose is a collection of sites across the country ALL offering to host the archive or provide access to its data via their computing facilities. We should be thinking of downloading of information electronically as the PRIMARY means of distribution of archive data, with only rare recourse to writing the information out onto magnetic media as a dissemination method. The model I have in mind is based upon that used for the ARPANET's Network Information Center (NIC), which maintains a list of software and personnel at all the sites it serves. One can access this database via connecting to it from anywhere on the network, and determine where the data you want is located, and set about its retrieval by either anonymous remote login and file-transfer-protocol (FTP) downloading of the data; or finding out who to contact as the holding institution's network liaison. So... data would be distributed around the country as suited the individual institutional member's computing facilities. Some institutions might opt to have copies of everything; others to themselves store nothing, but instead to keep texts they created on equipment elsewhere. Each member institution would have a designated liaison who maintained contact with the central information resource center which itself kept a complete database of what was available where, both in terms of data and computing facilities (not unlike a list of libraries, their holdings and research facilities) and also of researchers and their interests and how to reach them electronically. This part of the Humanities Archive Network would require funding, as well as the creation of the HumAN itself--though this is becoming easier and easier as more and more research communities take to setting up their own networks. I would think the NEH ought to find such a proposal well justified in terms of the potential multiplier effect it would have upon the entire field of (computational) research in scholarship. Robert A. Amsler Bellcore Morristown, NJ 07960 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Humanities Computing Yearbook (53 lines) Date: 8 December 1987, 19:12:29 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 529 (529) Contributed by Willard McCarty (in this case as YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS) Dear Colleagues: As some of you will know, I am gathering information about interesting and worthy software for a new serial, the Humanities Computing Yearbook, to be published by Oxford U.P. The announcement for the Yearbook follows. Please send your recommendations to me, c/o yearbook@utorepas.bitnet. Thanks very much for your help. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Humanities Computing Yearbook On behalf of Oxford University Press, the publishers, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities is pleased to announce a new periodical, The Humanities Computing Yearbook. Ian Lancashire and Willard McCarty are the co-editors. An editorial board is in process of being set up. The first volume, scheduled for publication in the summer of 1988, aims to give a comprehensive guide to publications, software, and specialized hardware organized by subject or area of application. Research and instructional work in many fields will be covered: ancient and modern languages and literatures, linguistics, history, philosophy, fine art, archaeology, and areas of computational linguistics affecting text-based disciplines in the humanities. The more notable software packages will be described in some detail. We welcome your suggestions of what we should consider. We are especially interested in discovering innovative software that may not be widely known, including working prototypes of systems in development. Electronic correspondence should be sent to YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS.BITNET, conventional mail to the Editors, The Humanities Computing Yearbook, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Univ. of Toronto, 14th floor, Robarts Library, 130 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5. Our telephone number is (416) 978-4238. Please feel free to distribute this notice. Ian Lancashire Willard McCarty From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Encoding: salvaging texts (addendum) Date: 8 December 1987, 22:00:06 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 530 (530) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Oops. I should have added that I am not saying that people should throw away everything that does not accord with the standard. I am saying that the standard should not try to accommodate inadequate texts. I like (my interpretation of) what Lou Burnard says about them (implicitly?): they are "rubbish." Well, ok, so we may be better off recycling many of them instead of just throwing them out, but let's say that they are in the recycle bin and not that they are in the approved bin. --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Encoding: salvaging texts Date: 9 December 1987, 09:03:00 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 531 (531) Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Robert Amsler corrects my perhaps overly vigorous condemnation of texts that have been marked up procedurally. I have no intention of entering the American Heritage Dictionary from scratch or even of working with a version that has all markup stripped away. Such markup can help one considerably in the process of deriving a descriptively marked up version. (Just to clarify, I AM working with the AHD.) I don't feel the same way about *Paradise Lost*, however. Perhaps I am being overly vigorous again, but I would rather enter that relatively tiny (compared to the AHD) and simple document myself than spend the same time negotiating for a tape, getting it loaded on the mainframe, learning the markup system, writing the programs to convert it to descriptive markup, etc. So, first point, dictionaries are unusually large and complicated. Poems, even long poems, imbue one with the poetic experience even when the task is as mindless as keyboarding (but they better be good poems too!). We have a continuum, and we have all of that old philosophical stuff about points at which one would just prefer to enter and proof read than to negotiate, acquire, interpret, program, etc. Second and final point, my concern was with the value of a metalanguage. Correct me if I am wrong, but the fact that I would rather convert the AHD than enter and proof read it has nothing to do with our ability to develop a metalanguage that will generate(JHC)/parse(RA) both the procedural and the descriptive markup. Perhaps one CAN develop a context-sensitive grammar that will enable one to uniquely identify every element type in the AHD. I don't know anyone who believes that they can develop that grammar more quickly than they can perform partial conversion automatically and then finish up by hand. If it's that difficult to generate the context-sensitive grammer, won't it be much more difficult to generate a metalanguage? Now, if a single grammar will work for many dictionaries (and we actually have the need to convert many dictionaries), then it may be justified to develop the grammar. Is this what you are working on, Robert? My goal was (and remains) to discourage what seems to me to be a quixotic pursuit: the development of a metalanguage that will generate(JHC)/parse(RA) all forms of markup for all documents. The fact that one may be better off with procedural markup than without it in some/many cases does not address my claim that such a metalanguage is impossible or even my weaker claim that even if it is impossible, it's not worth the effort (again, what's the gain?). --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: archives, mark-up and money (75 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 09:04:34 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 532 (532) Contributed by Phillipa Mathieson Interesting how HUMANIST discussions on standards for text encoding, making publishers aware of the need for electronic texts, assessing copyrights for such texts, establishing text archives, and programs for text searching and retrieval all seem to come together. It almost sounds as if we were all aiming for the same thing: texts on-line in machine-readable format with the software to manipulate them, available to all who want them. The main question seems to be "whose money are we going to use to achieve this?" Ian Lancashire's analogy of buying a car from commercial dealers, and the acceptance by other HUMANISTS from time to time of "intellectual copyright," and of the restrictive mechanisms needed to insure financial returns for the owners of that copyright, alarm me. I see no reason why academic grant money intended for humanist research should not be spent on laying down guidelines for the encoding of texts and the software to read them, and for distributing the results. And I agree with Lou Burnard that "the community gets the archive it deserves." If we aren't enough of a community, or interested enough in the disinterested rewards of scholarship, to share our work with others without demanding additional financial rewards (in most cases, over and above those already granted us by salaried positions in academic institutions or as staff members of publically-funded educational projects), we don't deserve either the positions or the use of on-line materials. I recently discussed with a Toronto software firm my need to use a database program (Empress32 from Rhodnius) on a second computer with slightly different architecture from the first. We had already bought a licence to use the program on one, and we wished to use the same program for the same project on another. Their attitude was that a firm which expands and buys a new machine must pay for a second licence for the new machine. I think they saw this as a kind of tax on the profits of the firm which their software was assumed to have contributed to. When I said we had no profits, the salesman kindly tried to explain to me that they had to protect their copyright in the program by charging individual licences for individual machines: "If you wrote an article and someone else used it as the basis for his own work, without acknowledgement, and made a great success of it, you'd sue the balls off him." This kind of commercial attitude has no place in humanist scholarship, and putting the development of archives and their software on a commercial basis will simply cheapen (in the sense of "lowering the quality"--certainly not in the financial sense) and restrict humanist activites. It is good to have an organized group establishing guidlelines for text mark-up and doing so in an open forum. It would be bad to have a commercially-based central text archive system which discouraged individual scholars from making available their work by maintaining an arcane set of instructions for mark-up, which only "they" really knew how to insert so that the standard software programs could use it. Michael Sperberg-McQueen's reservations about the software-development function of a central archive system are a good sign: setting up a central archive system seems to me likely to lead to the development of software for the specifications of that archive, and if you add the commercial competition angle, we'll all end up paying through the nose for the software *and* the texts, and running round nervously trying to comply with restrictive copyright requirements for texts long since free from their original publication copyright restrictions. At which point, it will again become easier to type it in yourself, and the idea of a community of scholars sharing their work will bite the dust yet again. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: What new information in texts of the Oxford Archive? (33 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 09:14:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 533 (533) Contributed by Lou Burnard The Text Archive gets a fair amount of criticism for not providing more information about the texts in the catalogue ('fair' meaning both "a modest quantity" and "justifiable"). As I am now embarking on a major overhaul consequent on a local change of mainframe, I'd like to start trying a bit harder to rectify this situation. Humanists and others who have a view can help by making some suggestions about what information they think ought (minimally) to be provided in the catalogue. I should stress that I dont have the resources to do a proper cataloguing job - not yet anyway. But some things that could be added to the current shortlist are 1. more bibliographic info (e.g. date of first publication/composition, genre etc) 2. some sort of code for level/type of markup 3. some sort of code indicating completeness, accuracy, level of verification 4. (probably not in the catalogue, but generated for each text) text profile i.e. everything that a program I havent written yet can deduce automatically about the text - size in records, tags used, character usage profile etc. Comments? Preferences? Concrete suggestions? Lou From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Archives and encoding (51 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 12:46:41 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 534 (534) Contributed by Richard Giordano From what I've been reading, four issues seems to be - if there is to be an machine-readable archive, where should it be? - who will pay for it? - what constitutes a coding standard? Michael Sperberg-McQueen also includes the questions, who is going to do the conversion, as well as the coding? The library community certainly will not get involved in conversion efforts. But you can be sure that the institutional structures already exist within the library community to both establish and maintain a data archive of machine readable text. They're in the business of collecting and making available information to users, and I think the best of them do a great job at it. Anyway, you can be certain that sooner or later--and probably sooner--the American Library Association is going to take up the issue. And when it does, the first thing that will come up is the establishment of a standard interchange format--much the same way that cataloging and other data is exchanged throughout the world in a standard MARC format. As for the Libraries point of view: nothing more and nothing less than to (1) preserve information; (2) index and describe the information so that users can easily get to the source information, as well as having an idea of what the information is about; (3) making the information available to users. There might be more to it than this, but I think this pretty-much covers it. It seems so obvious to me that the institutional structure exists, as well as the expertise, to establish a national archive of machine-readable texts, as well as assistance in generating a standard communications format. Libraries can also be of use in helping to establish practices by which text itself is indexed (since the indexing and retrieval of information for untrained users is at the heart of every librarian's professional education). Libraries, however, are not in the position to convert the sources into machine-readable form. Richard Giordano From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Salvaging Texts (20 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 14:41:51 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 535 (535) Contributed by Mark Olsen Funny that James Coombs should mention *Paradise Lost* since I am currently going through the process of pulling off of a tape and formatting it for my purposes. I think that he seriously over- estimates the effort required to use existing text data and under- estimates the effort required to scan and correct even a simple text. The materials stored at Oxford, Packard and ARTFL in any condition can be corrected, coded and formatted much faster than starting from hardcopy. Mark From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A national archive for the U.S. (97 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 19:05:35 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 536 (536) Contributed by Jack Abercrombie We have been following with much interest the discussion on establishing a national archive center similar in some respects to the Oxford Archive. Many of you are not aware that some four years ago the staff of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) submitted a working proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities advocating the establishment of a US national center for textual studies (including archive). From the comments then received as the proposal was circulated by NEH as well as other comments received at the Grenell conference (1985) where our draft proposal was discussed by fifteen representatives from national and international centers, the following conclusions seemed accurate. First, a national center at that time did not have a "snowball's prayer in hell" of coming into being given the general lack of collaboration and cooperation amongst US institutions and their faculties on this very issue. Second, regional centers, an idea originally proposed to us by the late Art Hanson from Princeton University (1982), would be a better approach in that a regional/discipline specific center can concentrate on a few tasks and do them well with limited resources. With this in mind, we established the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (1984). CCAT has focused on three specific areas both for internal and external In the spring of 1986 at the University of Toronto, we again proposed to the representatives of existing and potential centers (in US, Canada and England) that we should share information on our archival holdings, and that we should coordinate more fully our efforts to add texts to our archives as well as in software development. Of the six centers represented at that meeting, there seemed to be general agreement that it was a good idea to try to federate our efforts to avoid duplication and to cut costs in supporting international, accessible archives. Again we proposed to seek funding to make this a reality as well as to solve some other minor problems within the proposed consortium. Our hastily prepared proposal to begin implementing these ideas was submitted to NEH and severely criticized by some reviewers. We accepted the reality here, and have proceeded to work with other equally concerned institutions to make them aware of our archival holdings and to keep them informed on the projects taking place at CCAT (e.g. CD-ROM Project). This chronicle of frustration and also hope, we think, is instructive, because it points out that the ideal (that is, a national archive or even a federated sytem of archives) may not be realistic given the number and nature of the relevant participants. The reality, regional and discipline specialized centers, continues to grow in many positive ways. Unfortunately from our perspective, we would like to see more coordination than is possible as long as we work within the blinders of discipline, university, nation, etc. At the very least, centers should be sharing, as some already do, information on their archival holdings and additions to their archives whether by acquisition or data entry. (NOTE: To obtain information on CCAT's accessible archive request information sheet from CCAT, Box 36 College Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104.) Centers should also foster new ways for cooperation and collaborations. Towards this end, the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts in coordination with Computer Assisted Research Group (CARG) of the Society of Biblical Literature has begun an ambitious project to prepare an archival list of biblical and other material deemed relevant to CARG members. A first step will be to build an archival list along the lines of the information submitted by CCAT to the Rutgers Inventory Project. The second step will be acquiring copies of the texts not in CCAT's archives and placing that information in the same, consistent format (that is, the present format or a future format as is being discussed) of all the other material in CCAT's accessible archive. Prepared by John R. Abercrombie (Assistant Dean for Computing and Director of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) with cooperation from Robert Kraft (Coordinator of External Affairs CCAT and Director of CARG) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Correction (re: Yaacov Choueka's affiliation) Date: 9 December 1987, 19:29:44 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 537 (537) Contributed by "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" In the posting about the Vassar conference for planning the basic structure of the ACH/ACL/ALLC text encoding guidelines, Yaacov Choueka's affiliation was wrongly given. It should read: Institute for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics, and Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar=Ilan University I apologize for the error. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Warning about another Christmas virus Date: 9 December 1987, 19:30:58 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 538 (538) Contributed by "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" We've already had several score, by now probably a few hundred copies of this turning up here; it may reach you next. If you are at a CMS site and receive a program called CHRISTMA EXEC, please (a) warn your postmaster and (b) discard the exec (or keep a copy for the postmaster to look at, but DO NOT RUN IT). This exec paints a Christmas tree on your screen and then sends itself to everyone named in either your NAMES or NETLOG files. The result is potentially serious stress on Bitnet and on your local spool system, and possibly a few system crashes here and there as the number of reader files soars and exceeds the maximum. The Christmas tree isn't all that pretty, and the joke is pretty mean. A word to the wise. Your postmaster will thank you. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, UIC From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: archives-coding-texts Date: 9 December 1987, 19:35:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 539 (539) Contributed by Bob Kraft I really must finish up the task of insuring consistent ID coding for the dozens of texts on the forthcoming CCAT-PHI CD-ROM, or I would plunge in at length on the current Humanist discussions. Meanwhile, I will take a minute to UNDERSCORE the comments of Mark Olsen. It is hard for me to conceive of a situation in which it would be more efficient to rekey or to scan anew a text already extant in some electronically readable form. I also have *Paradise Lost* in the CCAT Archive, and formatted it into TLG Beta Code ID form last week, checking the results against a library edition. It probably took me about an hour, including making sure that every line began in upper case and that the "paragraph" type breaks in the poetry were indicated. This text will be on the CD-ROM and is available on IBM diskette to anyone who would like it for $25 (CCAT minimum charge) and who agrees (by signing the CCAT Users Contract) to use it non-commercially and responsibly. One person's "rubbish" is another's treasure. Some of the happiest hours of my weekend life have been spent in junkyards. Incidentally, CCAT texts come with a "convert" program to permit the user to change the file so that explicit book/line locators are inserted at the left margin of each line. This type of software development permits us to be consistent and frugal about coding the IDs without inconveniencing the user who might otherwise be mystified by the implicit nature of the ID system. To leave that task in the hands of others made no sense to us. We will handle "SGML-type" markup requests similarly, for existing textual materials. If people want concrete information about the issues raised in the current HUMANIST discussions, just ask. Few of the issues are hypothetical, at least to those of us already engaged in archiving, (re)coding, formatting, and distributing -- not to mention searching for funding and other types of support! Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Rage for chaos, or, in praise of polymorphic encoding (50 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 21:31:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 540 (540) Contributed by Sebastian Rahtz I have just been reprieved from the gallows! I had approx 110 HUMANIST messages from the last couple of weeks in my mailbox which I hadnt really read, and I had been planning to print out the whole lot and read it at home tonight. Due to a combination of unfortunate circumstances (daily backup, me reading my mail etc), I have now lost the whole damned lot! I feel so relieved! Can I put in my trivial penyworth, tho? Lets face it, I dislike SGML so much is because its UGLY. But however important it all is, could those who care about text archives gather in a corner away from HUMANIST for a while? i was under the impression that there was a conference about it recently, so is there a need for the same people to discuss it in public..... it all reminds me of archaeology. Some years ago field archaeologists in Britain used to bicker at every opportunity about standardisation of recording methods, and all the same arguments were trotted out every time. No-one ever agreed, various people said they would set up global answers, and even now there remain a multiplicity of schemes. Why did it all fail? Because the problem was really that people didnt know why they were collecting the data in the first place.... I for one no longer believe in absolute recording; I believe that each excavation record, or each encodedtext, is a reflection of its creator, not the real world. But i apologize for dipping my toe in the text-encoding water; I vote for chaos, though, when the chips are down. Why? Because I used to be an archaeologist, and therefore I am interested in historical processes not in fossilisation. In the same way that I would have anyone who wanted walk all over Stonehenge because 20th C destruction of monuments is itself archaeology, so I wouldn't shed many tears if Lou Burnard's archive went up in flames (sorry, Lou), because the variety of texts lost is itself interesting (would we compare the loss of Lou's tapes to the destruction of Alexandria?). People who try and impose 'standards' on the world are basically misguided--variety is the spice of life. Sorry, is there some NEED to analyse all texts in the world NOW that I am not aware of? And there was I thinking scholarship was only a joke..... sebastian rahtz, computer science, southampton, UK From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More Markup etc. (62 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 21:50:33 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 541 (541) Contributed by amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) I must admit I do have many reservations about the feasibility of coming up with a universal metalanguage for all markup schemes. I think this is first an empirical problem though, not a theoretical one. We need to know what markup systems are in use and how much text is/could be available in these systems. That will determine how much effort should be made to accomodate their markup system in any future standard. The exact trade-off point between developing a parser to read text marked up in an inadequate markup language and then adding `useful' markup vs. starting over and typing the text in with the `right' markup is a hard one to specify. Dictionaries are on the `use any machine-readable copy' side by a massive amount (i.e. probably the data entry effort is ten or a hundred times the effort of the `figure out how to use what they have' effort). However there is still another issue here, the likelihood that anyone else will want to markup the text in a manner that you would find completely satisfying. There strikes me as a large range of variations in descriptive markup from noting simple text units to noting full interpretive tagging of historical and symbolic meaning `believed' to be associated with certain parts of a text. The inference I get from James Coombs side is that there is somehow an easily understood common agreement as to what should be marked in a text. I am not certain I agree with that when one leaves the domain of markup which recreates the visible form of the original document and enters the interpretive tagging area. In fact, I would define `inadequate' markup as markup from which one cannot recreate the original form of the document--regardless of whether it is descriptive or procedural markup. I've be concerned about is that one cannot tag a text with all the descriptive markup that everyone might want to be there. Could anyone imagine a historic text being published with ALL the commentary upon its meaning being interspersed in the text? We'd have to have tags with authors names on them and maybe even dates. I think perhaps what is needed is a means of integrating interpretive tags with a rather sparsely marked up version of a document. That is, having a tag set which is stored independently of the text to which it refers and which can readily be sorted into the linear sequence of the document as desired. In fact I even imagine a futuristic world in which a scholar can distribute ONLY their tag set for a well-known work, such that the recipients can study it with their copy of the original text on a variety of software and hardware systems. Some might simply elect to have the `annotated' text printed out on paper for study--others to have it loaded into a hypertext system for interactive reading on-line. Robert Amsler Bellcore Morristown, NJ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Heisenbergian mark-up (46 lines) Date: 9 December 1987, 23:06:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 542 (542) Contributed by Willard McCarty Here's a brief and probably one-sided observation about textual mark-up, offered by someone interested chiefly in the themes and images of literary texts rather than in their syntactic structures or physical features. Regardless of the medium, when I mark up a text for interpretation I am doing something like reading it, that is, taking it in, attaching to its words things I know, discover, or think about, and preserving all that along with the original text. I want to mark-up my own text because (a) marking-up in my sense is primarily an intellectual, not a mechanical activity, and (b) it is utterly dependent on some hypothetical construct I have or am developing. (Building this construct may owe a debt to things that can be counted, hence "objectively" tagged, but the construct cannot be verified by relating it to countable things.) At the same time I must always keep a clear distinction between the words as the author or editor has given them, and if I'm doing this electronically with proper software, I have the liberty of erasing easily the remnants of interpretation I no longer respect. Note that I am not making a distinction here between an "objective" text and "subjective" commentary; that distinction misses the point of literary criticism altogether. So, I don't want anybody's scheme for marking up (in my sense), and I don't expect my marked up text to be of interest to anybody either. Nevertheless, if I'm successful, the final result (an essay or book) will say something valuable to others. Can it be said that there are aspects of textual mark-up that do not have to take interpretation into account at all? Sebastian Rahtz has suggested that there aren't. Willard McCarty, Univ. of Toronto (mccarty@utorepas.bitnet) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Copyright-free Texts Wanted (130 lines) Date: 10 December 1987, 09:15:25 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 543 (543) Contributed by amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler One project I and some others at Bellcore are interested in is an effort to integrate a dictionary with citations to texts with these texts. The OED is the dictionary we have in mind, though I am also working with the Century Dictionary (not yet in machine-readable form) and other dictionaries such as the Collins English Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. `Integrate' here means to provide access to the complete textual work from the dictionary definitions and visa versa, to provide access to the definitions from within the textual work. This is being envisioned as a form of hypertext access. The primary requirement is to obtain textual works which are cited in these dictionaries--which basically means most classical works in English. Appended to this message is a lit of the most frequently cited authors and works from the OED (compiled by actually searching the OED database thanks to Frank Tompa' help). 29140 citations - Shakespeare 1311 citations - Hamlet (1600-1) 1034 citations - Love's Labour's Lost (1594-5) 906 citations - 2 Henry IV (1590-91) 877 citations - Merchant of Venice (1596-7) 874 citations - King Lear (1605-6) 868 citations - The Tempest (1611-12) 865 citations - Romeo and Juliet (1594-5) 862 citations - 1 Henry IV (1597-8) 846 citations - Macbeth (1605-6) 841 citations - Henry V (1598-9) 834 citations - Othello (1604-5) 821 citations - Merry Wives of Windsor (1599-1600) 801 citations - Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-6) 794 citations - King John (1596-7) 779 citations - Richard III (1592-3) 778 citations - Troilus and Cressida (1601-2) 775 citations - As You Like It (1599-1600) 705 citations - Measure for Measure (1604-5) 15499 citations - Scott, Sir Walter 890 citations - The Heart of Midlothian (1817) [Novel] 880 citations - The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) [Novel] 694 citations - Guy Mannering (1815) [Novel] 644 citations - The Antiquary (1816) [Novel] 616 citations - Kenilworth (1821) [Novel] 599 citations - Lady of the Lake (1810) [Poem] 592 citations - Waverley (1814) [Novel] 543 citations - Rob Roy (1817) [Novel] 532 citations - Old Mortality (1816) [Novel] 490 citations - Marmion (1808) [Poem] 474 citations - The Monastery (1820) [Novel] 428 citations - Ivanhoe (1820) [Novel] 405 citations - Quentin Durward (1823) [Novel] 344 citations - Lord of the Isles (1815) [Novel] 328 citations - Woodstock (1826) [Novel] 11967 citations - Milton, John 4945 citations - Paradise Lost 648 citations - Samson Agonistes (1671) [Poem] 640 citations - Paradise Regained (1671) 625 citations - Comus (1634) [Poem] (A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle 1634: on Michaelmasse night etc.) 11000 citations - Chaucer 1238 citations - Troylus (Troilus ? and Criseyde) (1382?) [8200 line poem] 986 citations - (Translation of Boeth(ius)'s ``Consolation of Philosophy'') (1380?) [Prose] 877 citations - The Legend of Good Women (1382) 663 citations - Prologue (to The Legend of Good Women) 549 citations - The Knight's Tale 506 citations - The House of Fame 10759 citations - Wyclif 1166 citations - Selected Works 1072 citations - Works 713 citations - Sermons 474 citations - Genesis 420 citations - Isa 413 citations - Matt 315 citations - Ecclus 306 citations - Ps 278 citations - Luke 265 citations - Prov 9554 citations - Caxton 1282 citations - The Golden Legend (1483) 718 citations - The Foure Sonnes of Aymon (1489?) 668 citations - The boke yf (= of) Eneydos'' (1490) 639 citations - The chronicles of englond (1480) 610 citations - The historie of Jason (1477) 457 citations - Geoffroi de la Tour l'Andri (the knyght of the toure) (1483) 399 citations - The historye of reynard the foxe (1481) 399 citations - The book of fayttes of armes and of chyualrye (1483) 8745 citations - Dryden 11041 citations - 11041 citations - Cursor Mundi 5385 citations - Sebastian Rahtz says: People who try and impose 'standards' on the world are basically misguided--variety is the spice of life. This may be true, but I should point out that no one on HUMANIST is trying to impose standards or anything else on anyone. As if anyone could! And if anyone must rely on the differences between TLG and SGML methods for encoding chapter headings to give spice to intellectual life, humanities computing is in even deeper trouble that I thought. Willard McCarty says: So, I don't want anybody's scheme for marking up [...] and I don't expect my marked up text to be of interest to anybody either. [...] At the same time I must always keep a clear distinction between the words as the author or editor has given them, and if I'm doing this electronically with proper software, I have the liberty of erasing easily the remnants of interpretation I no longer respect. Would a conventional set of markup rules restrict one's freedom more than the conventional alphabets and syntax we already use? But the crucial point is that the "proper software" you describe cannot do its work without *some* encoding scheme. We have the choice of all of us developing software independently, so as to ensure that we use different schemes and make certain that once you have marked up your text with your software you cannot concord it with my software, and vice versa, or we can try to find a framework that allows sharing and flexibility. It is not standardization but chaos that produces rigidity and destroys freedom. -Michael Sperberg-McQueen University of Illinois at Chicago From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: "electronic paralanguage" (100 lines)Computer-mediated Communication Date: 10 December 1987, 12:23:15 ESTSun, 6-DEC-1987 12:38 EST Janet F. Asteroff X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 545 (545) From Dr Abigail Ann Young 1-416-585-4504 YOUNG at UTOREPAS This notice appeared in IRList, and I found it sufficiently interesting to pass along to HUMANIST. I apologise in advance to those who will be getting it twice! ********************************************** . . . I recently completed my dissertation on paralanguage in electronic mail, the abstract of which is appended to this posting. I found, among the 16 people I studied, many forms of "extra expression" in the form of "paralanguage." Ultimately, I documented enough differences between writing on the computer and writing through other media to identify it as "electronic paralanguage" with its own formal definition. Many people believe that face-to-face communication is the richest form of communication because of the variety of signals and channels, and as well the potential for channel redundancy. I have no problem with this assumption. I do, however, take issue with comparing other forms of communication to face-to-face and then judging any other medium as "information poor." Some scholars of computer-mediated communication carry this negative frame of reference over to their own work. While the computer may not provide as many channels as face-to-face communication, and the channel itself may be somewhat more limited, there is considerable research to indicate that computer users have done some interesting things to convey their meaning and message. Since I am not a fan of clogging up boards with long messages, anyone interested in my work can contact me directly at Asteroff@cutcv1.bitnet and I will be happy to send you more material. The dissertation is also available through University Microfilms: Janet F. Asteroff, "Paralanguage in Electronic Mail: A Case Study." Teachers College, Columbia University, May, 1987. /Janet (Asteroff@cutcv1.bitnet) ABSTRACT PARALANGUAGE IN ELECTRONIC MAIL: A CASE STUDY Janet F. Asteroff This study explores the use of paralanguage in electronic mail communication. It examines the use of paralanguage according to the electronic mail and computing experience and technical expertise of 16 library science graduate students who fall into two groups by rank of experience, novice and advanced. These respondents used electronic mail in a non-elective and task-related situation to communicate with their instructor. This case study is based on a multi-level qualitative content analysis of the electronic mail exchanged between the respondents and the instructor, and the attitudes and experiences of the respondents about their use of electronic mail and computers. This research interprets the roles and functions of paralanguage in computer-mediated communication and explores the phenomenon as an indicator of certain kinds of expression. Paralanguage is a component of spoken, written, and electronic communication. It gives to what is being communicated a character over and above that which is necessary to convey meaning in the linguistic or grammatical sense. Paralanguage in electronic mail is positioned between spoken and written paralanguage in its visual and interpretive structures. Electronic paralanguage, a term developed to describe paralanguage in computer-mediated communication, is defined Electronic paralanguage is revealed to be a component of communication which in some situations showed substantial differences by the rank of the respondent, as well as differences in individual behaviors. Novice respondents used more paralanguage in more types of messages than did advanced respondents. Electronic paralanguage also provides a robust picture of the character of communication. The use of exclamation points by novice respondents in task-related messages showed that electronic paralanguage can in certain cases be a general measure of stress and experience, and as well is a precise indicator of different kinds of positive and negative psychological stress. ------------------------------ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More on ACH Standards for Markup (63 lines) Date: 10 December 1987, 16:25:16 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 546 (546) From Nancy Ide > In response to Jim Coombs' comments and questions: > (1) My messages may have been sent out in the wrong order, but I meant to make it clear that we fully agree with Jim's assertion that we cannot know al l of ou needs yet, and for that reason the standard will be extensible--and we hope to make user-defined extensions far easier to deal with than AAP does. But as Bob Amsler pointed out, a standard which specifies so little that most researchers end up inventing their own tags anyway is not of much use. Bob also mentioned that our subcommittees are going to have to work closely together to avoid redundancy and to make note of places where alternate descriptions, related to different applications, describe what may be physically the same thing--something Jim was concerned about. I think Bob's idea of a "data dictionary" is excellent and I hope we can implement it in the course of development. (2) By "multiple parallel hierarchies" I mean something along the lines of what Jim outlined--except that his examples all use nicely nested entities. The problems arise when we have overlapping entities, for example, the dog ran where "" and "" mark the beginning and end of a noun phrase, respectively, and "" and "" mark the beginning and end of another entity--say, a thematic unit of some kind. The context-free syntax of SGML cannot handle this, and so special mechanisms are required to enable multiple tag sets in which overlapping entities may be specified. As I mentioned, these exist in SGML but are not entirely straightforward, from my understanding. (3) The ultimate goal of an attempt to develop some formal description of existing schemes is to facilitate the development of translation programs to translate old formats into the new one. I sympathize with Jim's feeling that we shouldn't spend so much time converting the past, but I also understand, after spending 48 hours with the keepers of the European and Middle-eastern archives which house millions of words of machine-readable text, that it is not possible to mount this effort without considering what to do about texts that already exist in machine-readable form. I should also point out that at the end of the two-day meeting in Poughkeepsie we had a discussion about establishing a North American archive, but by that time many particpants had left and those who remained had little energy left to address the issue vigorously. However I understood those who spoke to say that they didn't feel the need to establish such an archive, and that in any case the Oxford model (where no guarantees of quality are made) is sufficient. I personally tend to agree with Jim that an archive--North American or better yet, international--should be established in which texts are "guaranteed," and which more importantly serves as a central clearinghouse. Oxford does this as well as it can now but without considerably more funding cannot more vigorously pursue the acquisition and creation of machine-readable texts nor ensure that they are both correct and tagged in a standard form. Nancy Ide ide@vassar From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A new HUMANIST GUIDE (268 lines) Date: 10 December 1987, 23:11:09 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 547 (547) Dear Colleagues: A somewhat revised version of the guide to HUMANIST follows. As always your comments are welcome, to mccarty@utorepas.bitnet. Yours, W.M. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A Guide to HUMANIST +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ C O N T E N T S I. Nature and Aims II. How to use HUMANIST A. Sending and receiving messages B. Conventions and Etiquette C. Distributing files D. ListServ's commands and facilities E. Suggestions and Complaints From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 548 (548) I. Nature and aims From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 549 (549) Welcome to HUMANIST, a Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN discussion group for people who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review software, answer questions, give advice, program, write documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this area are included. Although HUMANIST is intended to help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is primarily meant for discussion rather than publication or advertisement. HUMANIST is an activity of the Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources, which is in turn an affiliate of both the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Although participants in HUMANIST are not required to be members of either organization, membership in them is highly recommended. HUMANIST currently has more than 170 members in 10 countries around the world. In general, HUMANISTs are encouraged to ask questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards. Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly different from the support of other kinds of computing, with which it may be confused. It does not fit easily into the established categories of academia and is not well understood by those from whom recognition is sought. Apart from the general discussion, HUMANIST encourages the formation of a professional identity by maintaining an informal biographical directory of its members. This directory is automatically sent to new members when they join. Supplements are issued whenever warranted by the number of new entries. Members are responsible for keeping their entries updated. Those from any discipline in or related to the humanities are welcome, provided that they fit the broad guidelines described above. Please tell anyone who might be interested to send a message to me, giving his or her name, address, telephone number, and a short biographical description of what he or she does to support computing in the humanities. This description should cover academic background and research interests, both in computing and otherwise; the nature of the job this person holds; and, if relevant, its place in the university. Please direct applications for membership in HUMANIST to MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET, not to HUMANIST itself. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 550 (550) II. How to Use HUMANIST From: Subject: Textual archives and encoding (45 lines) Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 551 (551) A. Sending and receiving messages ----------------------------------------------------------------- Although HUMANIST is managed by software designed for Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN, members can be on any comparable network with access to Bitnet, for example, Janet or Arpanet. Users on these networks suffer only slight restrictions, which will be mentioned below. Submissions to HUMANIST are made by sending electronic mail as if to a person with the user-id HUMANIST and the node-name UTORONTO. All valid submissions are sent to every member, without exception. The editor of HUMANIST screens submissions only to prevent the inadvertent distribution of junk mail, which would otherwise be a serious problem for such a highly complex web of individuals using a wide variety of computing systems linked together by several different electronic networks. The editor will usually pass valid mail on to the membership within a few hours of submission. The volume of mail on HUMANIST varies with the state of the membership and the nature of the dominant topic, if any. Recent experience shows that as many as half a dozen or more messages a day may be processed. For this reason members are advised to pay regular, indeed frequent attention to their e-mail or serious overload may occur. A member planning on being away from regular contact should advise the editor and ask to be temporarily removed from active membership. The editor should be reminded when active membership is to be resumed. The editor also asks that members be careful to specify reliable addresses. In some cases the advice of local experts may help. Any member who changes his or her userid or nodename should first give ample warning to the editor and should verify the new address. If you know your system is going to be turned off or otherwise adjusted in a major way, find out when it will be out of service and inform the editor. Missed mail can be retrieved, but undelivered e-mail will litter the editor's mailbox. [Please note that in the following description, commands will be given in the form acceptable on an IBM VM/CMS system. If your system is different, you will have to make the appropriate translation.] ----------------------------------------------------------------- B. Conventions and Etiquette ----------------------------------------------------------------- Conversations or asides restricted to a few people can develop from the unrestricted discussions on HUMANIST by members communicating directly with each other. This may be a good idea for very specific replies to general queries, so that members are not burdened with messages of interest only to the person who asked the question and, perhaps, a few others. Members have, however, shown a distinct preference for unrestricted discussions on nearly every topic, so it is better to err on the side of openness. If you do send a reply to someone's question, please restate the question very briefly so that the context of your answer will be clear. [Note that the REPLY function of some electronic mailers will automatically direct a user's response to the editor, from whom all submissions technically originate, not to the original sender or to HUMANIST. Thus REPLY should be avoided in many cases.] Use your judgment about what the whole group should receive. We could easily overwhelm each other and so defeat the purpose of HUMANIST. Strong methods are available for controlling a discussion group, but the lively, free-ranging discussions made possible by judicious self-control seem preferable. Controversy itself is welcome, but what others would regard as tiresome junk- mail is not. Courtesy is still a treasured virtue. Make it an invariable practice to help the recipients of your messages scan them by including a SUBJECT line in your message. Be aware, however, that some people will read no more than the SUBJECT line, so you should take care that it is accurate and comprehensive as well as brief. If you can, note the length of your message in the subject line. The resulting line should look something like this: Use your judgment about the length of your messages. If you find yourself writing an essay or have a substantial amount of information to offer, it might be better to follow one of the two methods outlined in the next section. All contributions should also specify the member's name as well as e-mail address. This is particularly important for members whose user-ids bear no relation to their names. ----------------------------------------------------------------- C. Distributing files ----------------------------------------------------------------- HUMANIST offers us an excellent means of distributing written material of many kinds, e.g., reviews of software or hardware. (Work is now underway to provide this service for reviews.) Although conventional journals remain the means of professional recognition, they are often too slow to keep up with changes in computing. With some care, HUMANIST could provide a supplementary venue of immediate benefit to our colleagues. There are two possible methods of distributing such material. More specialized reports should probably be reduced to abstracts and posted in this form to HUMANISTs at large, then sent by the originators directly to those who request them. The more generally interesting material in bulk can be sent in an ordinary message to all HUMANISTs, but this could easily overburden the network so is not generally recommended. We are currently working on a means of centralized storage for relatively large files, such that they could be fetched by HUMANISTs at will, but this means is not yet fully operational. At present the only files we are able to keep centrally are the monthly logbooks of conversations on HUMANIST. See the next section for details. ----------------------------------------------------------------- D. ListServ's Commands and Facilities ----------------------------------------------------------------- As just mentioned, ListServ maintains monthly logbooks of discussions. Thus new members have the opportunity of reading contributions made prior to joining the group. To see a list of these logbooks, send the following command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO SENDME HUMANIST FILELIST Note that in systems or networks that do not allow interactive commands to be given to a Bitnet ListServ (I will call such systems "non-interactive"), the same thing can be accomplished be sending a message to HUMANIST with the command as the first and only line, which should read as follows: GET HUMANIST FILELIST The logbooks are named HUMANIST LOGyymm, where "yy" represents the last two digits of the year and "mm" the number of the month. The log for July 1987 would, for example, be named HUMANIST LOG8707, and to get this log on a system that supports interactive commands to HUMANIST you would issue the following: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET HUMANIST LOG8705 On a non-interactive system, you would send HUMANIST a message with the following line: GET HUMANIST LOG8705 Note that on a non-interactive system as many of these one-line commands as you wish can be put in a message to HUMANIST. ListServ accepts several other commands, for example to retrieve a list of the current members or to set various options. These are described in a document named LISTSERV MEMO. This and other documentation will normally be available to you from your nearest ListServ node and is best fetched from there, since in that way the network is least burdened. You should consult with your local experts to discover the nearest ListServ; they will also be able to help you with whatever problems in the use of ListServ you may encounter. Once you have found the nearest node XXXXXX, type the following: TELL LISTSERV AT XXXXXX INFO ? or, on a non-interactive system: INFO ? The various documents available to you will then be listed. ----------------------------------------------------------------- E. Suggestions and Complaints ----------------------------------------------------------------- Suggestions about the running of HUMANIST or its possible relation to other means of communication are very welcome. So are complaints, particularly if they are constructive. Experience has shown that an electronic discussion group can be either beneficial or burdensome to its members. Much depends on what the group as a whole wants and does not want. Please make your views known, to everyone or to me directly, as appropriate. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Willard McCarty, 8 December 1987 Editor of HUMANIST, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto (MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Reply to Rahtz's pro-chaos message (30 lines) Date: 10 December 1987, 23:16:27 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 552 (552) From Robert Amsler Actually, `THE' standard for encoding text already exists, so I'm afraid it doesn't really matter whether we like it or not. I speak of SGML itself, ISO standard 8879, which was approved Sept., 1986. The AAP (American Association of Publishers) also has completed work on an application of the SGML standard, the so called AAP standard--which itself will soon be adopted--also, whether or not humanities computing professionals care or not. The good news for chaos fans is that so-far very few publishers have made much of an effort to convert to the AAP standard or to pledge to make their data available in that standard. Some agencies of the US govrnment are making noises about accepting electronic texts in the standard (such as NSF, NLM, etc.) and some software merchants (SoftQuad) have marketed programs which use the standard for typesetting, editing, etc. So... what remains. The AAP standard (and SGML itself) is based on the concept of `document types' having their own appropriate set of `tags'. The document types which have been created are only the most generic sort for magazine articles and books--though they contain specs for tables and math. equations. The humanities community has expresed no preferences so far, such as developing its own document types for things such as plays, poetry, etc. The stage is set for humanists to have a voice in the future of publisher's formats. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The flavour of HUMANIST (22 lines) Date: 11 December 1987, 09:00:16 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 553 (553) [The following was sent me by Sebastian Rahtz. It is a quotation from the Archaeological Information Exchange and applies well to the kind of thing HUMANIST is, or at least what I think it is. It is quoted with gratitude but without permission. --ed.] "An archaeological information exchange network should avoid programmatic constraints, thereby maintaining the sense of immediacy, the ebb and flow of discourse and activity which represent the situational flux of daily life, while at the same time providing explicit points of reference in order to prevent total chaos." [Brian Molyneaux] From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Archives/Markup/TeX Date: 11 December 1987, 10:22:59 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 554 (554) From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) Just a point of information, relating to the current debate about markup systems and text archives. It was mentioned by Michael Sperberg-McQueen that the First Folio has to be encoded right down to the typographical level in order to be of maximum use. This reminded me of an on-line database of mathematical abstracts offered by the American Mathematical Society, called MathSci (if I remember correctly). The whole (large) database is encoded in TeX, and a micro implementation of TeX is sold/given to all subscribers to the system. You dial up, search the database, and download whatever you want, or can afford. Then you run your entries through TeX, which is sitting there quietly on your hard disk, and presto, you have a typeset version of your mathematical texts. You can view it on your screen using a DVI previewer, or print it out to paper on anything from a 9-pin matrix printer to a phototypesetter. The important thing in this is the different levels of encoding being represented. The TeX markup specifies the main structural elements of the datum, but the macro package that is located with the TeX implementation (AMSTeX) controls the interpretation of the tags in the database, right down to the positioning of individual characters on the output medium. Just a thought. Dominik Wujastyk dow@harvunxw.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Author's query on scholars and telecommunications (25 lines) Date: 12 December 1987, 10:57:48 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 555 (555) From Terry Erdt For a book forthcoming from Paradigm Press, entitled The Electronic Scholar's Resource Guide, I am putting together a piece on telecommunications, which will include bulletin board systems, libraries with catalogs capable of dial-up connections, Humanet on Scholarsnet, BRS and Dialog, some forums on CompuServe, Bitnet's IRList Digest, as well as, of course, Humanist. I would appreciate any suggestions for broadening the scope of coverage as well as any information about specific resources. Terrence Erdt Erdt@vuvaxcom.Bitnet Technical Review Editor Computers and the Humanities Grad. Dept. of Library Science Villanova University Villanova, PA 19085 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: No text or archive; joy in 29 lines Date: 12 December 1987, 14:59:03 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 556 (556) From Marshall Gilliland * * * * * ** ** ** ** * * * * * / \ / v \ Seasons *-- --* Happy \ o @ & / / \ / | \ Greetings *-- O --* New / * \ / * \ / % * * * \ and *-- --* Year / * * * * \ / * Saskatoon * *\ / | * | * | * | * \ / O & $ @ \ *-------------------------* | | | | | _&_ % | | Q U | / | |_____| _\@/_ |___| | # | |#SASK| | # == Marshall Gilliland _________________________________________|__#__|_____________________ From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: text encoding: a Thesaurus Linguae Graecae user's perspective. Date: 13 December 1987, 13:41:53 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 557 (557) Contributed by Brad Inwood (124 lines) Text mark up and coding have turned out to be THE issues for HUMANISTs to get productively excited about. It is, after all, the most natural focus for the rather loose set of interests shared by those who think of themselves as humanities types. Some observations: The debate about what constitutes an adequate set of tags in a machine-readable text is obviously a reflex of the interests (and discipline) of the researcher. It would be astounding if we could agree about acceptable minimal markup. My own view is that text archives need only hold texts which preserve streams of words, minimal and transparent editorial markup to signal emendations, restorations, etc.; flags for verse and metre; and precise and unambiguous indications of the normal reference format (Bekker pages, columns and lines for Aristotle; line numbers for Greek tragedies; book and line for Homer; or whatever is standard). Where no standard reference style descends to the level of single lines (as within chapters of modern novels) line-level reference should be imposed by the file itself (e.g. chapter 3, line 769: 769th line of that chapter in the electronic file) rather than imported from the text one happens to be imputting from -- even if it is what the researcher regards as the best text. If archives are to create standard reference forms where none exist for printed editions (as in this case) they should do so in a manner appropriate to their medium, not the printed medium. researchers who require more markup should bloody well add it themselves and not burden archives with worries about anything more elaborate. My own work with machine readable texts is limited to various materials in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae text base; my own notions of minimally acceptable coding and entry format stem from this experience. without pausing too much for the rationale in each case, I would extract the following lessons: 1. preservation of information about page breaks and line ends in the original text is not worth the effort. 2. it is particularly bad if one preserves that information at the cost of retaining soft hyphens in the text which are of no semantic significance but a mere product of the typesetter's art. contrary to what everyone says, it is not trivial to strip them out in a global move; more important, software must be made to do fancy tricks not to take line ends alone as separators; to make it ignore hyphens at line end is even harder. yes, I know it can be done, but why must we bother? removing hyphens from such text is the single most difficult and time-consuming job I have had, and the one with the highest risk of introducing errors into an already proof-read text. 3. the TLG preserves page layout information in a fanatical way: e.g. it will tell you that a given line is to be indented by so many tabs, but not that it is a verse quotation. translating the tabs to spaces is easy enough, but why not just have a tag to mark verse and the particular metre? 4. markup for standard reference style is there in the TLG, but inconsistently implemented from author to author. in the Platonic corpus, for example, Stephanus pages and columns are declared at the head of each dialogue and subsequently incremented by a flag; a special programme is needed to convert the 79th [x] after a declared [x21] actually means Stephanus page 100. Line numbers are usually suppressed (although they are part of the standard reference format for Plato), but occasionally lines are indicated explicitly. No guidance is given as to why this is so, when the much more important page and column references are so badly handled. 5. never let anyone tell you that a decent proofreading job can be done by someone who does not know the language well or is not reading with attention to the sense. the TLG was keyboarded, not scanned, and yet broken characters in the printed edition used have turned up as the wrong character in the final corrected files (Burnet's Oxford Text of Plato is still running on the original plates and there are a lot of broken characters which no literate reader could mistake; but no one caught the rho with the missing tail: looks just like an omicron and would even have scanned as one; the best visual confirmation based on comparison with the printed source would not reveal an error). I fear that scholars are really going to have to have one round of proofreading everything, so I am pleased that some HUMANISTs feel that keyboarding Milton can be fun. 6. standard coding delimiters are needed which can be regarded as non-separators by software (I guess that means that the opening and closing delimiters must be characters NEVER used as delimiters, parentheses or punctuation marks). Otherwise the coding used to mark a conjectural supplement will break the word when the text stream is analyzed by software. 7. if you really want the kind of information which would make an electronic text useful for serious editorial work (full apparatus, notation of font changes, change of hands, etc.) then it seems to me you need something more than an electronic text. you probably need a hyper-text system of some sort or a fantastically complex data-base-cum-text. with custom software. I start from the assumption that most users of electronic texts want a clean accurate electronic copy, well-referenced, so that they can mark it up for their own analytical purposes or search for and analyze the words in it. it is a job of an entirely different order to prepare a data base which can be used to help edit a text. the TLG's omission of textual apparatus is much lamented, and reasonably so; but in this case I think they got it right. better to get the text out and make it usable. if they had waited to settle on how to handle the apparatus in the electronic text, (a) we would still be waiting for the TLG, and (b) they would have had, in effect, to re-edit all of ancient Greek literature, not just enter and correct. the editorial talent for that job simply does not exist. the media via of just typing the apparatus which happens to be in the text you choose to keyboard or scan is a perfect example of falling between two stools: not enough to make electronic analysis possible, too much for absolute ease of use and speed of production. this is all pretty bitty, but that is how user's experience tends to come out, I guess. maybe the peon's perspective will be of some use when the theoretical issues threaten to get out of hand -- or proportion. Brad Inwood From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Gaudeamus igitur in about 200 lines Date: 14 December 1987, 23:49:56 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 558 (558) Dear Colleagues: I've never before sent you a list of everyone who belongs to HUMANIST, thinking that you could get this information yourself from ListServ at any time. This time of year, however, motivates me to do so, I guess in celebration of an unusual, international (though monolingual), once noisy, sometimes argumentative, and to me always interesting fellowship. So, to all of us listed below -- some directly, some hidden in redistribution lists -- I wish a very happy Hanukkah and very merry Christmas. I think the Buddha's birthday is also celebrated about this time of year, and doubtless I have missed other holidays, for which forgive me. Yours, W.M. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * HUMANIST Discussion list - created 07 MAY 87 * CJOHNSON@ARIZRVAX Christopher Johnson OWEN@ARIZRVAX David Owen ATMKO@ASUACAD Mark Olsen ATPMB@ASUACAD Pier Baldini CNNMJ@BCVMS M. J. Connolly CHOUEKA@BIMACS Yaacov Choueka ALLEN@BROWNVM Allen H. Renear JAZBO@BROWNVM James H. Coombs ST401742@BROWNVM Timothy Seid HAMESSE@BUCLLN11 Jacqueline Hamesse THOMDOC@BUCLLN11 CETEDOC Belgium WORDS@BUCLLN11 Robert Hogenraad JONES@BYUADMIN Randall Jones ECHUCK@BYUHRC Chuck Bush H_JOHANSSON%USE.UIO.UNINETT@CERNVAX Stig Johansson BJORNDAS@CLARGRAD Sterling Bjorndahl YOUNGC@CLARGRAD Charles M. Young spqr@cm.soton.ac.uk Sebastian Rahtz FKOCH%OCVAXA@CMCCVB Christian Koch PRUSSELL%OCVAXA@CMCCVB Roberta Russell mffgkts@cms.umrcc.ac.uk Tony Smith nash@cogito.mit.edu David Nash epkelly@csvax1.tcd.hea.irl Elizabeth Dowse MCCARTHY@CUA William J. McCarthy JMBHC@CUNYVM Joanne M. Badagliacco RSTHC@CUNYVM Robert S. Tannenbaum TERGC@CUNYVM Terence Langendoen MTKUS@CUVMA Mark Kennedy RCLUS@CUVMA Robert C. Lehman SLZUS@CUVMA Sue Zayac cul.henry@cu20b.columbia.edu Chuck Henry cul.lowry@cu20b.columbia.edu Anita Lowry cul.woo@cu20b.columbia.edu Janice Woo humanist@edinburgh.ac.uk Humanist Group r.j.hare@edinburgh.ac.uk Roger Hare cameron@exeter.ac.uk Keith Cameron amsler@flash.bellcore.com Robert Amsler GAUTHIER@FRTOU71 Robert Gauthier DOW@HARVUNXW Dominik Wujastyk GALIARD@HGRRUG5 Harry Gaylord HUET@HUJIPRMB Emanuel Tov ST_JOSEPH@HVRFORD David Carpenter ayi017@ibm.soton.ac.uk Brendan O'Flaherty cpi047@ibm.soton.ac.uk Simon Lane fri001@ibm.soton.ac.uk Sean O'Cathasaigh ayi004@ibm.southampton.ac.uk Brian Molyneaux CONSERVA@IFIIDG Lelio Camilleri GG.BIB@ISUMVS Rosanne Potter S1.CAC@ISUMVS Carol Chapelle sano@jpl-vlsi.arpa Haj Sano nick@lccr.sfu.cdn Nick Cercone bol@liuida.uucp Birgitta Olander RPY383@MAINE Colin Martindale psc90!jdg@mnetor.uucp Joel Goldfield humanist@mts.durham.ac.uk Humanists' Group CHADANT@MUN Tony Chadwick DGRAHAM@MUN David Graham H156004@NJECNVM Kenneth Tompkins FAFEO@NOBERGEN Espen Ore FAFKH@NOBERGEN Knut Hofland collins@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk Beryl T. Atkins g.dixon@pa.cn.umist.ac.uk Gordon Dixon KRAFT@PENNDRLN Robert Kraft JACKA@PENNDRLS Jack Abercrombie jld1@phx.cam.ac.uk John L. Dawson PKOSSUTH@POMONA Karen Kossuth sdpage@prg.oxford.ac.uk Stephen Page T3B@PSUVM Tom Benson BALESTRI@PUCC Diane P. Balestri RICH@PUCC Richard Giordano TOBYPAFF@PUCC Toby Paff d.mitchell@qmc.ac.uk David Mitchell BARNARD@QUCDN David T. Barnard LESSARDG@QUCDN Greg Lessard LOGANG@QUCDN George Logan ORVIKT@QUCDN Tone Orvik WIEBEM@QUCDN M. G. Wiebe weinshan%cps.msu.edu@relay.cs.net Donald Weinshank GILLILAND@SASK Marshall Gilliland JULIEN@SASK Jacques Julien FRIEDMAN_E@SITVXA Edward A. Friedman JHUBBARD@SMITH Jamie Hubbard ZRCC1001@SMUVM1 Robin C. Cover GX.MBB@STANFORD Malcolm Brown XB.J24@STANFORD John J. Hughes ACDRLK@SUVM Ron Kalinoski DECARTWR@SUVM Dana Cartwright bs83@sysa.salford.ac.uk Max Wood A79@TAUNIVM David Sitman lb0q@te.cc.cmu.edu Leslie Burkholder ECSGHB@TUCC George Brett DUCALL@TUCCVM Frank L. Borchardt DYBBUK@TUCCVM Jeffrey Gillette SREIMER@UALTAVM Stephen R. Reimer TBUTLER@UALTAVM Terry Butler USERDLDB@UBCMTSG Laine Ruus EGC4BFD@UCLAMVS Kelly Stack IBQ1JVR@UCLAMVS John Richardson IMD7VAW@UCLAMVS Vicky Walsh IZZY590@UCLAVM George Bing U18189@UICVM Michael Sperberg-McQueen qghu21@ujvax.ulster.ac.uk Noel Wilson BAUMGARTEN@UMBC Joseph Baumgarten J_CERNY@UNHH Jim Cerny CLAS056@UNLCDC3 John Turner FELD@UOFMCC Michael Feld CSHUNTER@UOGUELPH Stuart Hunter AMPHORAS@UTOREPAS Philippa Matheson ANDREWO@UTOREPAS Andrew Oliver ANNE@UTOREPAS Anne Lancashire BRAINERD@UTOREPAS Barron Brainerd ERSATZ@UTOREPAS Harold Chimpden Earwicker IAN@UTOREPAS Ian Lancashire INWOOD@UTOREPAS Brad Inwood MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Willard McCarty ROBERTS@UTOREPAS Robert Sinkewicz STAIRS@UTOREPAS Mike Stairs WINDER@UTOREPAS Bill Winder YOUNG@UTOREPAS Abigail Young ZACOUR@UTOREPAS Norman Zacour humanist@utorgpu.utoronto Humanist Redistribution List S_RICHMOND@UTOROISE S. Richmond BRADLEY@UTORONTO John Bradley DESOUS@UTORONTO Ronald de Sousa ESWENSON@UTORONTO Eva V. Swenson LIDIO@UTORONTO Lidio Presutti PARROTT@UTORONTO Martha Parrott PAULIE2@UTORONTO Test Account 42104_263@uwovax.uwo.cdn Glyn Holmes 42152_443@uwovax.uwo.cdn Richard Shroyer IDE@VASSAR Nancy Ide a_boddington@vax.acs.open.ac.uk Andy Boddington aeb_bevan@vax.acs.open.ac.uk Edis Bevan may@vax.leicester.ac.uk May Katzen catherine@vax.oxford.ac.uk Catherine Griffin dbpaul@vax.oxford.ac.uk Paul Salotti john@vax.oxford.ac.uk John Cooper logan@vax.oxford.ac.uk Grace Logan lou@vax.oxford.ac.uk Lou Burnard stephen@vax.oxford.ac.uk Stephen Miller susan@vax.oxford.ac.uk Susan Hockey v002@vaxa.bangor.ac.uk Thomas N. Corns udaa270@vaxa.cc.kcl.ac.uk Susan Kruse wwsrs@vaxa.stir.ac.uk Keith Whitelam ej1@vaxa.york.ac.uk Edward James gw2@vaxa.york.ac.uk Geoffrey Wall jrw2@vaxa.york.ac.uk John Wolffe chaa006@vaxb.rhbnc.ac.uk Philip Taylor srrj1@vaxb.york.ac.uk Sarah Rees Jones cstim@violet.berkeley.edu Tim Maher f.e.candlin@vme.glasgow.ac.uk Francis Candlin CHURCHDM@VUCTRVAX Dan M. Church ERDT@VUVAXCOM Terry Erdt fwtompa@watdaisy.uucp Frank Tompa DDROB@WATDCS Don D. Roberts VANEVRA@WATDCS James W. Van Evra WALTER@WATDCS Walter McCutchan drraymond@watmum.waterloo Darrell Raymond makkuni.pa@xerox.com Ranjit Makkuni xeroxhumanists~.x@xerox.com Humanists at Xerox ELI@YALEVM Doug Hawthorne YAEL@YKTVMH2 Yael Ravin DANIEL@YORKVM1 Daniel Bloom YFAN0001@YORKVM1 Gerald L. Gold YFPL0004@YORKVM1 Shu-Yan Mok YFPL0018@YORKVM1 Paul Kashiyama CS100006@YUSOL Peter Roosen-Runge GL250012@YUVENUS Jim Benson * * Total number of users subscribed to the list: 168 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: An idea about biographies; Supplement 5 (440 lines) Date: 15 December 1987, 23:40:40 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 559 (559) Dear Colleagues: At some point in the near future, if anyone would care for such a thing, I have it in mind to do a proper job on the biographies. Apart from the editing and formatting, this would involve collecting a revised biographical statement from each of you, if you'd care to supply one. These might be written or rewritten according to a suggested list of things to be mentioned -- to make them *slightly* less chaotic without taking the play out. The revised collection would be for circulation only on HUMANIST. What do you think? Please let me know if the idea strikes you as worthy of effort. What do you think should be on the list of things to be mentioned? Meanwhile, the next supplement follows. Yours, W.M. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Fifth Supplement Following are 23 additional entries to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to mccarty@utorepas.bitnet. W.M. 16 December 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 560 (560) *Atwell, Eric Steven Centre for Computer Analysis of Language and Speech, AI Division, School of Computer Studies, Leeds University, Leeds LS2 9JT; +44 532 431751 ext 6 I am in a Computer Studies School, but specialise in linguistic and literary computing, and applications in Religious Education in schools. I would particularly like to liaise with other researchers working in similar areas. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 561 (561) *Benson, Tom {akgua,allegra,ihnp4,cbosgd}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!t3b (UUCP) t3b%psuvm.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa (ARPA) Department of Speech Communication, The Pennsylvania State University 227 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802; 814-238-5277 I am a Professor of Speech Communication at Penn State University, currently serving as editor of THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH. In addition, I edit the electronic journal CRTNET (Communication Research and Theory Network). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 562 (562) *CETEDOC (CENTRE DE TRAITEMENT ELECTRONIQUE DES DOCUMENTS) CETEDOC, LLN, BELGIUM THE CETEDOC (CENTRE DE TRAITEMENT ELECTRONIQUE DES DOCUMENTS) IS AN INSTITUTION OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN AT LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, BELGIUM. ITS DIRECTOR IS PROF. PAUL TOMBEUR. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 563 (563) *Chadwick, Tony Department of French & Spanish, Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, A1B 3X9; (709)737-8572 At the moment I have two interests in computing: one is the use of computers in composition classes for second language learners, the socond in computerized bibliographies. I have an M.A. in French from McMaster and have been teaching at Memorial University since 1967. Outside computers, my research interests lie in Twentieth Century French Literature. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 564 (564) *Coombs, James H. Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, Brown University Box 1946, Providence, RI 02912 I have a Ph.D. in English (Wordsworth and Milton: Prophet-Poets) and an M.A. in Linguistics, both from Brown University. I have been Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English and am about to become Software Engineer, Research, Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). I have co-edited an edition of letters (A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship, UMI Research Press) and have written on allusion and implicature (Poetics, 1985; Brown Working Papers in Linguistics). Any day now, the November Communications of the ACM will appear with an article on "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing," written with Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose. I developed the English Disk on the Brown University mainframe, which provides various utilities for humanists, primarily for word processing and for staying sane in CMS. I wrote a Bibliography Management System for Scholars (BMSS; 1985) and then an Information Management System for Scholars (IMSS; 1986). Both are in PL/I and may best be considered "aberrant prototypes," used a little more than necessary for research but never commercialized. I am currently working on a system with similar functionality for the IBM PC. Last year, I developed a "comparative concordance" for the multiple editions of Wordsworth's Prelude. I am delayed in that by the lack of the final volume of Cornell's fine editions. A preliminary paper will appear in the working papers of Brown's Computing in the Humanities User's Group (CHUG); a full article will be submitted in January, probably to CHUM. I learned computational linguistics from Prof. Henry Kucera, Nick DeRose, and Andy Mackie. Richard Ristow taught me software engineering management or, more accurately, teaches me more every time I talk to him. I worked on the spelling corrector, tuning algorithms. I worked on the design of the grammar corrector, designed the rule structures, and developed the rules with Dr. Carol Singley. Then I started with Dr. Phil Shinn's Binary Parser and developed a language independent N-ary Parser (NAP). NAP reads phrase structure rules as well as streams of tagged words (see DeRose's article in Computational Linguistics for information on the disambiguation) and generates a parse tree, suitable for generalized pattern matching. Finally, at IRIS, I will be developing online dictionary access from our hypermedia system: Intermedia (affix stripping, unflection, definition, parsing, etc.). In addition, we are working on a unified system for accessing multiple databases, including CD-ROM as well as remote computers. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 565 (565) *Dawson, John L. University of Cambridge, Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA England; (0223) 335029 I have been in charge of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre of Cambridge University since 1974, and now hold the post of Assistant Director of Research there. The LLCC acts as a service bureau for all types of humanities computing, including data preparation, and extends to the areas of non-scientific computing done by members of science and social science faculties. Much of our work remains in the provision of concordances to various texts in a huge range of languages, either prepared by our staff, by the user, or by some external body (e.g. TLG, Toronto Corpus of Old English, etc.) Some statistical analysis is undertaken, as required by the users. Recently, we have begun preparing master pages for publication using a LaserWriter, and several books have been printed by this means. My background is that of a mathematics graduate with a Diploma in Computer Science (both from Cambridge). I am an Honorary Member of ALLC, having been its Secretary for six years, and a member of the Association for History and Computing. My present research (though I don't have much time to do it) lies in the comparison of novels with their translations in other languages. At the moment I am working on Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir" in French and English, and on Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" in English and French. I have contributed several papers at ALLC and ACH conferences, and published in the ALLC Journal (now Literary & Linguistic Computing) and in CHum. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 566 (566) *Giordano, Richard I am a new humanities specialist at Princeton University Computer Center (Computing and Information Technology). I come to Prinecton from Columbia University where I was a Systems Analyst in the Libraries for about six years. I am just finishing my PhD dissertation in American history at Columbia as well. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 567 (567) *Johnson, Christopher Language Research Center, Room 345 Modern Languages, University of Arizona Tucson, Az 85702; (602) 621-1615 I am currently the Director of the Lnaguage Research Center at the University of Arizona. Masters in Educational Media, Univeristy of Arizona; Ph.D. in Secondary Education (Minor in Instructional Technology), UA. I have worked in the area of computer-based instruction since 1976. I gained most of my experience on the PLATO system here at the University and as a consultant to Control Data Corp. Two years ago I moved to the Faculty of Humanities to create the Language Research Center, a support facility for our graduate students, staff, and faculty. My personnal research interests are in the area for individual learning styles, critical thinking skills, Middle level education and testing as they apply to computer-based education. The research interests of my faculty range from text analysis to word processing to research into the use of the computer as an instructional tool. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 568 (568) *Johansson, Stig Dept of English, Univ of Oslo, P.O. Box 1003, Blindern, N-0315 Oslo 3, Norway. Tel: 456932 (Oslo). Professor of English Language, Univ of Oslo. Relevant research From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 569 (569) Academic Computing Services, 215 Machinery Hall, Syracuse University Syracuse, New York 13244; 315/423-3998 I am Associate Director for Research Computing at Syracuse University and am interested in sponsoring a seminar series next spring focusing on computing issues in the humanities. I hope that this will lead to hiring a full-time staff person to provide user support services for humanities computing. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 570 (570) *Langendoen, D. Terence Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036-8099 USA; 212-790-4574 (soon to change) I am a theoretical linguist, interested in parsing and in computational linguistics generally. I have also worked on the problem of making sophisticated text-editing tools available for the teaching of writing. I am currently Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America, and will continue to serve until the end of calendar year 1988. I have also agreed to serve on two working committees on the ACH/ALLC/ACL project on standards for text encoding, as a result of the conference held at Vassar in mid-November 1987. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 571 (571) *Molyneaux, Brian Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, England. I am at present conducting postgraduate research in art and ideology and its relation to material culture. I am also a Field Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Department of New World Archaeology, specialising in rock art research. I obtained a BA (Hons) in English Literature, a BA (Hon) in Anthropology, and an MA in Art and Archaeology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. My research interest in computing in the Humanities includes the analysis of texts and art works within the context of social relations. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 572 (572) *Olofsson, Ake I am at the Department of Psychology, University of Umea, in the north of Sweden. Part of my work at the department is helping people to learn how to use our computer (VAX and the Swedish university Decnet) and International mail (Bitnet). We are four system-managers at the department and have about 40 ordinary users, running word-processing, statistics and Mail programs. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 573 (573) *ORVIK, TONE POST OFFICE BOX 1822, KINGSTON, ON K7L 5J6; 613 - 389 - 6092 WORKING ON BIBLE RESEARCH WITH AFFILIATION TO QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY'S DEPT. OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES; CREATING CONCORDANCE OF SYMBOLOGY. HAVE WORKED AS A RESEARCHER, TEACHER, AND WRITER, IN EUROPE AND CANADA; ESPECIALLY ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF BIBLE AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION. INTERESTED IN CONTACT WITH NETWORK USERS WITH SAME/SIMILAR INTEREST OF RESEARCH. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 574 (574) *Potter, Rosanne G. Department of English, Iowa State University, Ross Hall 203, (515) 294-2180 (Main Office); (515) 294-4617 (My office) I am a literary critic; I use the mainframe computer for the analysis of literary texts. I have also designed a major formatting bibliographic package, BIBOUT, in wide use at Iowa State University, also installed at Princeton and Harvard. I do not program, rather I work with very high level programming specialists, statisticians, and systems analysts here to design the applications that I want for my literary critical purposes. I am editing a book on Literary Computing and Literary Criticism containing essays by Richard Bailey, Don Ross, Jr., John Smith, Paul Fortier, C. Nancy Ide, Ruth Sabol, myself and others. I've been on the board of ACH, have been invited to serve on the CHum editorial board. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 575 (575) *Renear, Allen H. My original academic discipline is philosophy (logic, epistemology, history), and though I try to keep that up (and expect my Ph.D. this coming June) I've spent much of the last 7 years in academic computing, particularly humanities support. I am currently on the Computer Center staff here at Brown as a specialist in text processing, typesetting and humanities computing. I've had quite a bit of practical experience designing, managing, and consulting on large scholarly publication projects and my major research interests are similarly in the general theory of text representation and strategies for text based computing. I am a strong advocate of the importance of SGML for all computing that involves text; my views on this are presented in the Coombs, Renear, DeRose article on Markup Systems in the November 1987 *Communications of the ACM*. Other topics of interest to me are structure oriented editing, hypertext, manuscript criticism, and specialized tools for analytic philosophers. My research in philosophy is mostly in epistemic logic (similar to what AI folks call "knowledge representation"); it has some surprising connections with emerging theories of text structure. I am a contact person for Brown's very active Computing in the Humanities User's Group (CHUG). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 576 (576) *Richardson, John Associate Professor, University of California (Ls Angeles), GSLIS; (213) 825-4352 One of my interests is analytical bibliography, the desription of printed books. At present I am intrigued with the idea that we can describe various component parts of books, notably title pages, paper, and typefaces, but the major psycho-physical element, ink, is not described. Obviously this problem involves humanistic work but also a far degree of sophistication with ink technology. I would be interested in talking with or corresponding with anyone on this topic... From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 577 (577) *Taylor, Philip Royal Holloway & Bedford New College; University of London; U.K; (+44) 0784 34455 Ext: 3172 Although not primarily concerned with the humanities (I am principal systems programmer at RHBNC), I am freqently involved in humanties projects, particularly in the areas of type-setting (TeX), multi-lingual text processing, and natural language analysis, among others. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 578 (578) *Whitelam, Keith W. Dept. of Religious Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland; Tel. 0786 3171 ext. 2491 I have been lecturer in Religious Studies at Stirling since 1978 with prime responsibility for Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My research interests are mainly aimed at exploring new approaches to the study of early Israelite/ Palestinian history in an interdisciplinary context, i.e. drawing upon social history, anthropology, archaeology, historical demography, etc. I have been constructing a database of Palestinian archaeological sites, using software written by the Computing Science department, in order to analyse settlement patterns, site hierarchies, demography, etc. The department of Environmental Science has recently purchased Laser Scan an offered me access to the facilities. This will enable me to display settlement patterns, sites, etc in map form for analysis and comparison. I am particularly interested in corresponding/discussing with others working on similar problems, particularly in Near Eastern archaeology. I have also been involved in exploring the possibilities of setting up campus-wide text processing laser printing facilities. It looks as though we shall be able to offer a LaTeX service in the New Year. We are also planning to offer a WYSIWYG service, such as Ventura on IBM or a combination with Macs for the production of academic papers. Again I have a particular interest in the use of foreign fonts, e.g. Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Greek, etc. My teaching and research on the Hebrew Bible leads to a concern with developing computer-aided text analysis, although I have had little time to explore this area. We have OCP available on our mainframe VAX but my use of this has been very limited. I see this as an important area of future development in teaching and research along with Hebrew teaching. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 579 (579) *Wilson, Noel Head of Academic Services, University of Ulster, Shore Road Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim, N. Ireland BT37 0QB; (0232)365131 Ext. 2449 My post has overall responsibility for the central academic computing service, offered by the Computer Centre, to the University academic community. Within this brief, my Section is responsible for the acquisition/development and documentation of CAL and proprietary software. We currently provide a program library in support of courses and research which contains approx. 400 programs; of these approx. 80 are in-house developments, 50 proprietary systems and the remainder obtained from a variety of sources incl. program libraries (eg CONDUIT - Univ. of Iowa). We have only very recently addressed computing within the Faculty of Humanities; academic staff in the Faculty have used computers in a research capacity and are now turning towards the various u'grad. courses. Presently we hold a grant of 79,000 pounds from the United Kingdom Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils, for the development of CAL software in support of Linguistics and Lexicostatistics. Within this project we are attempting to develop courseware to support grammar teaching in French, German, Spanish and Irish (details of existing materials appropriate to u'grad. teaching would be most welcome!). We also are investigating the creation of software to support an analysis of text (comparative studies) - in this area we are looking at frequency counts assoc. with words/expressions/words within registers etc. - again help would be appreciated. I am happy to provide further details on any of the above points and wish to keep informed of useful Humanities-related CAL work elsewhere. We currently use the Acorn BBC micro. but are also moving in the direction of PC clones. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 580 (580) *Wood, Max Computing Officer, 403 Maxwell Building, The University of Salford The Crescent, Salford, G.M.C. ENGLAND; 061-736-5843 Extension 7399 We are involved in a project to introduce the use of computing in teaching here in the Business and Management Department of Salford University and I am keen to extend links to other Business schools both here in the U.K. and indeed in the U.S.A. Obviously therefore I would like to join your forum so as to possibly exchange ideas news etc. My background is essentially in computing and I mainly supervise the computing resources available to our Department, and have formulated much of the teaching systems we currently use. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 581 (581) *Wujastyk, Dominik I am a Sanskritist with some knowledge of computing. Once upon a time (1977-78) I learned Snobol4 from Susan Hockey at Oxford, where I did undergraduate and later doctoral Sanskrit. More recently, I have been using TeX on my PC AT (actually a Compaq III), and in the middle of this summer I published a book _Studies on Indian Medical History_, which was done in TeX and printed out on an HP LJ II, and sent to the publisher as camera ready. It all went very well. I have received the MS DOS Icon implementation from Griswold at Arizona, but have not spent time on it. I am trying to teach myself at the moment, just to learn enough to knock out ocassional routines to convert files from wordprocessor formats to TeX, and that sort of thing. (Probably reinventing the wheel.) At the present time I am editing a Sanskrit text on medieval alchemy, and doing all the formatting of the edition in LaTeX. Before I ever started Sanskrit, I did a degree in Physics at Imperial College in London, but that is so long ago that I don't like to think about it! From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 582 (582) *Young, Charles M. Dept. of Philosophy, The Claremont Graduate School I am a member of the American Philosophical Association's committee on Computer Use in Philosophy. One of my pet projects is to find some way of making the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database (all of classical Greek through the 7th century C.E.) more readily available to working scholars. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 583 (583) *END* From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: National text archive (45 lines) Date: 16 December 1987, 15:24:57 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 584 (584) From C. Faulhaber (U.C. Berkeley, ked@coral.berkeley.edu) via Tim Maher 1) Text Archives. What is needed is some sort of alliance between the computing types and the professional librarians. It seems to me that there is a much better chance of getting a national text archive if it can be integrated into an ongoing concern. I list three candidates, in decreasing order of feasibility: a) RLG: Through their PRIMA project they are actively interested in providing access to new information resources. b) The organization at the U. of Michigan which already maintains data bases for use in the social sciences. c) OCLC: They have relatively less experience than RLG in providing services for research institutions but are aggressively expanding their range. 2) Citation dictionaries: John Nitti (Medieval Spanish Seminary, 1120 Van Hise Hall, U. of Wisconsin, Madison 53720) has been working on just such a dictionary (Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language) since ca. 1970, although the original plan was to draw the citations from texts transcribed specifically for that purpose and publish in standard format on OED lines. With optical disk technology, the possibility now exists to combine DOSL and athe texts themselves. In fact, we are contemplating the possibility of combining these 2 elements with my own Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts serving as a data base front end in order to search through texts on the basis of, e.g., date, author, subject. Prof. Charles Faulhaber Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Univ. of California, Berkeley. ked@coral.berkeley.edu From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Info (30 lines) Date: 17 December 1987, 15:53:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 585 (585) From Mark Olsen A student here is doing a project on the discourse of John Woolman and is looking for computer readable versions of texts by other 18th century American Quakers for comparisons. I would appreciate any info concerning the availability of these texts before scanning them in. A second, stranger request has come through. I have a faculty member who is studying a 19th century manuscript. Parts of it were crossed out and she is wondering if there is the possibility of using computer enhancement of the images to improve readability. She has tried blowing-up the images, but has not gotten much. Any ideas? I must that I know nothing about image processing except what I read about concerning the space shots. Maybe I should try JPL (snicker). Thanks in advance, Mark Olsen I don't know how many lines of text this has, but it doesn't conform to any known mark-up standard. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Christmas gift for HUMANISTs (50 lines) Date: 17 December 1987, 19:51:24 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 586 (586) From Sebastian Rahtz The following Christmas gift for HUMANISTs is prompted by a description Lou Burnard sent me of the Vassar 'text encoding standards' meeting, and by the subsequent HUMANIST discussion (no I dont have permission to 'publish' this) Incidentally, a recent contribution to HUMANIST implied that text-encoding standards were a central issue to all HUMANISTs. May I stand up for the archaeologists, musicians, art-historians, linguists and philosophers amongst us to say that there is more to humanities computing than text! equality for all. Sebastian Rahtz (spqr@uk.ac.soton.cm) A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, a hard time we had of it. at the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly. but there was no information, and so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. all this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this set down From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Test message Date: 21 December 1987, 15:01:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 587 (587) This is a test. Please neither do nor conclude anything because of its appearance. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Whereabouts of R.G. Ragsdale Date: 21 December 1987, 19:29:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 588 (588) From Christian Koch On December 4 an announcement was sent out over HUMANIST regarding a proposed course to be offered in connection with the European Conference on Computers in Education to be held next summer in Lausanne, Switzerland. The proposal was by R.G. Ragsdale and the course in question was International Educational Thanks! Christian Koch Oberlin College From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ICEBOL (106 lines) Date: 22 December 1987, 10:50:41 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 589 (589) From David Sitman ICEBOL3 April 21-22, 1988 Dakota State College Madison, SD 57042 ICEBOL3, the International Conference on Symbolic and Logical Computing, is designed for teachers, scholars, and programmers who want to meet to exchange ideas about non-numeric computing. In addition to a focus on SNOBOL, SPITBOL, and Icon, ICEBOL3 will feature introductory and technical presentations on other dangerously powerful computer languages such as Prolog and LISP, as well as on applications of BASIC, Pascal, and FORTRAN for processing strings of characters. Topics of discussion will include artificial intelligence, expert systems, desk-top publishing, and a wide range of analyses of texts in English and other natural languages. Parallel tracks of concurrent sessions are planned: some for experienced computer users and others for interested novices. Both mainframe and microcomputer applications will be discussed. ICEBOL's coffee breaks, social hours, lunches, and banquet will provide a series of opportunities for participants to meet and informally exchange information. Sessions will be scheduled for "birds of a feather" to discuss common interests (for example, BASIC users group, implementations of SNOBOL, computer generated poetry). Call For Papers Abstracts (minimum of 250 words) or full texts of papers to be read at ICEBOL3 are invited on any application of non-numeric programming. Planned sessions include the following: artificial intelligence expert systems natural language processing analysis of literary texts (including bibliography, concordance, and index preparation) linguistic and lexical analysis (including parsing and machine translation) preparation of text for electronic publishing computer assisted instruction grammar and style checkers music analysis. Papers must be in English and should not exceed twenty minutes reading time. Abstracts and papers should be received by January 15, 1988. Notification of acceptance will follow promptly. Papers will be published in ICEBOL3 Proceedings. Presentations at previous ICEBOL conferences were made by Susan Hockey (Oxford), Ralph Griswold (Arizona), James Gimpel (Lehigh), Mark Emmer (Catspaw, Inc.), Robert Dewar (New York University), and many others. Copies of ICEBOL 86 Proceedings are available. ICEBOL3 is sponsored by The Division of Liberal Arts and The Business and Education Institute of DAKOTA STATE COLLEGE Madison, South Dakota For Further Information All correspondence including abstracts and papers as well as requests for registration materials should be sent to: Eric Johnson ICEBOL Director 114 Beadle Hall Dakota State College Madison, SD 57042 U.S.A. (605) 256-5270 Inquiries, abstracts, and correspondence may also be sent via electronic mail to: ERIC @ SDNET (BITNET) ------- End of Forwarded Message From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The reason for a silent HUMANIST from 15 to 21 December Date: 23 December 1987, 21:46:36 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 590 (590) Dear Colleagues: You may have assumed that the silence of HUMANIST from about 15 to 21 December was due to a mass unplugging of terminals and departing for seasonal festivals, but this is not entirely so. A new version of ListServ (the software that runs HUMANIST), just installed about then, ran amok, wrote about 1,000,000 lines in the system log here, and so provoked our postmaster into disconnecting it -- and with it HUMANIST. The messages that seemed to be sent out during that period went into limbo, where apparently they still sit. These may suddenly appear in your readers, perhaps even in duplicate or triplicate, or they may not show up at all. Against the latter possibility, I am sending you copies of the limbo'd messages in two batches, with my best wishes for your good health and prosperity in the new year. Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS Subject: An idea about biographies; Supplement 5 (440 lines) Date: 15 December 1987, 23:40:40 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 591 (591) Dear Colleagues: At some point in the near future, if anyone would care for such a thing, I have it in mind to do a proper job on the biographies. Apart from the editing and formatting, this would involve collecting a revised biographical statement from each of you, if you'd care to supply one. These might be written or rewritten according to a suggested list of things to be mentioned -- to make them *slightly* less chaotic without taking the play out. The revised collection would be for circulation only on HUMANIST. What do you think? Please let me know if the idea strikes you as worthy of effort. What do you think should be on the list of things to be mentioned? Meanwhile, the next supplement follows. Yours, W.M. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Fifth Supplement Following are 23 additional entries to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome, to mccarty@utorepas.bitnet. W.M. 16 December 1987 From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 592 (592) *Atwell, Eric Steven Centre for Computer Analysis of Language and Speech, AI Division, School of Computer Studies, Leeds University, Leeds LS2 9JT; +44 532 431751 ext 6 I am in a Computer Studies School, but specialise in linguistic and literary computing, and applications in Religious Education in schools. I would particularly like to liaise with other researchers working in similar areas. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 593 (593) *Benson, Tom {akgua,allegra,ihnp4,cbosgd}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!t3b (UUCP) t3b%psuvm.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa (ARPA) Department of Speech Communication, The Pennsylvania State University 227 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802; 814-238-5277 I am a Professor of Speech Communication at Penn State University, currently serving as editor of THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH. In addition, I edit the electronic journal CRTNET (Communication Research and Theory Network). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 594 (594) *CETEDOC (CENTRE DE TRAITEMENT ELECTRONIQUE DES DOCUMENTS) CETEDOC, LLN, BELGIUM THE CETEDOC (CENTRE DE TRAITEMENT ELECTRONIQUE DES DOCUMENTS) IS AN INSTITUTION OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN AT LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, BELGIUM. ITS DIRECTOR IS PROF. PAUL TOMBEUR. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 595 (595) *Chadwick, Tony Department of French & Spanish, Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, A1B 3X9; (709)737-8572 At the moment I have two interests in computing: one is the use of computers in composition classes for second language learners, the socond in computerized bibliographies. I have an M.A. in French from McMaster and have been teaching at Memorial University since 1967. Outside computers, my research interests lie in Twentieth Century French Literature. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 596 (596) *Coombs, James H. Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, Brown University Box 1946, Providence, RI 02912 I have a Ph.D. in English (Wordsworth and Milton: Prophet-Poets) and an M.A. in Linguistics, both from Brown University. I have been Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English and am about to become Software Engineer, Research, Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). I have co-edited an edition of letters (A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship, UMI Research Press) and have written on allusion and implicature (Poetics, 1985; Brown Working Papers in Linguistics). Any day now, the November Communications of the ACM will appear with an article on "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing," written with Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose. I developed the English Disk on the Brown University mainframe, which provides various utilities for humanists, primarily for word processing and for staying sane in CMS. I wrote a Bibliography Management System for Scholars (BMSS; 1985) and then an Information Management System for Scholars (IMSS; 1986). Both are in PL/I and may best be considered "aberrant prototypes," used a little more than necessary for research but never commercialized. I am currently working on a system with similar functionality for the IBM PC. Last year, I developed a "comparative concordance" for the multiple editions of Wordsworth's Prelude. I am delayed in that by the lack of the final volume of Cornell's fine editions. A preliminary paper will appear in the working papers of Brown's Computing in the Humanities User's Group (CHUG); a full article will be submitted in January, probably to CHUM. I learned computational linguistics from Prof. Henry Kucera, Nick DeRose, and Andy Mackie. Richard Ristow taught me software engineering management or, more accurately, teaches me more every time I talk to him. I worked on the spelling corrector, tuning algorithms. I worked on the design of the grammar corrector, designed the rule structures, and developed the rules with Dr. Carol Singley. Then I started with Dr. Phil Shinn's Binary Parser and developed a language independent N-ary Parser (NAP). NAP reads phrase structure rules as well as streams of tagged words (see DeRose's article in Computational Linguistics for information on the disambiguation) and generates a parse tree, suitable for generalized pattern matching. Finally, at IRIS, I will be developing online dictionary access from our hypermedia system: Intermedia (affix stripping, unflection, definition, parsing, etc.). In addition, we are working on a unified system for accessing multiple databases, including CD-ROM as well as remote computers. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 597 (597) *Dawson, John L. University of Cambridge, Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA England; (0223) 335029 I have been in charge of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre of Cambridge University since 1974, and now hold the post of Assistant Director of Research there. The LLCC acts as a service bureau for all types of humanities computing, including data preparation, and extends to the areas of non-scientific computing done by members of science and social science faculties. Much of our work remains in the provision of concordances to various texts in a huge range of languages, either prepared by our staff, by the user, or by some external body (e.g. TLG, Toronto Corpus of Old English, etc.) Some statistical analysis is undertaken, as required by the users. Recently, we have begun preparing master pages for publication using a LaserWriter, and several books have been printed by this means. My background is that of a mathematics graduate with a Diploma in Computer Science (both from Cambridge). I am an Honorary Member of ALLC, having been its Secretary for six years, and a member of the Association for History and Computing. My present research (though I don't have much time to do it) lies in the comparison of novels with their translations in other languages. At the moment I am working on Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir" in French and English, and on Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" in English and French. I have contributed several papers at ALLC and ACH conferences, and published in the ALLC Journal (now Literary & Linguistic Computing) and in CHum. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 598 (598) *Giordano, Richard I am a new humanities specialist at Princeton University Computer Center (Computing and Information Technology). I come to Prinecton from Columbia University where I was a Systems Analyst in the Libraries for about six years. I am just finishing my PhD dissertation in American history at Columbia as well. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 599 (599) *Johnson, Christopher Language Research Center, Room 345 Modern Languages, University of Arizona Tucson, Az 85702; (602) 621-1615 I am currently the Director of the Lnaguage Research Center at the University of Arizona. Masters in Educational Media, Univeristy of Arizona; Ph.D. in Secondary Education (Minor in Instructional Technology), UA. I have worked in the area of computer-based instruction since 1976. I gained most of my experience on the PLATO system here at the University and as a consultant to Control Data Corp. Two years ago I moved to the Faculty of Humanities to create the Language Research Center, a support facility for our graduate students, staff, and faculty. My personnal research interests are in the area for individual learning styles, critical thinking skills, Middle level education and testing as they apply to computer-based education. The research interests of my faculty range from text analysis to word processing to research into the use of the computer as an instructional tool. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 600 (600) *Johansson, Stig Dept of English, Univ of Oslo, P.O. Box 1003, Blindern, N-0315 Oslo 3, Norway. Tel: 456932 (Oslo). Professor of English Language, Univ of Oslo. Relevant research From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 601 (601) Academic Computing Services, 215 Machinery Hall, Syracuse University Syracuse, New York 13244; 315/423-3998 I am Associate Director for Research Computing at Syracuse University and am interested in sponsoring a seminar series next spring focusing on computing issues in the humanities. I hope that this will lead to hiring a full-time staff person to provide user support services for humanities computing. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 602 (602) *Langendoen, D. Terence Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036-8099 USA; 212-790-4574 (soon to change) I am a theoretical linguist, interested in parsing and in computational linguistics generally. I have also worked on the problem of making sophisticated text-editing tools available for the teaching of writing. I am currently Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America, and will continue to serve until the end of calendar year 1988. I have also agreed to serve on two working committees on the ACH/ALLC/ACL project on standards for text encoding, as a result of the conference held at Vassar in mid-November 1987. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 603 (603) *Molyneaux, Brian Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, England. I am at present conducting postgraduate research in art and ideology and its relation to material culture. I am also a Field Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Department of New World Archaeology, specialising in rock art research. I obtained a BA (Hons) in English Literature, a BA (Hon) in Anthropology, and an MA in Art and Archaeology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. My research interest in computing in the Humanities includes the analysis of texts and art works within the context of social relations. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 604 (604) *Olofsson, Ake I am at the Department of Psychology, University of Umea, in the north of Sweden. Part of my work at the department is helping people to learn how to use our computer (VAX and the Swedish university Decnet) and International mail (Bitnet). We are four system-managers at the department and have about 40 ordinary users, running word-processing, statistics and Mail programs. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 605 (605) *ORVIK, TONE POST OFFICE BOX 1822, KINGSTON, ON K7L 5J6; 613 - 389 - 6092 WORKING ON BIBLE RESEARCH WITH AFFILIATION TO QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY'S DEPT. OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES; CREATING CONCORDANCE OF SYMBOLOGY. HAVE WORKED AS A RESEARCHER, TEACHER, AND WRITER, IN EUROPE AND CANADA; ESPECIALLY ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF BIBLE AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION. INTERESTED IN CONTACT WITH NETWORK USERS WITH SAME/SIMILAR INTEREST OF RESEARCH. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 606 (606) *Potter, Rosanne G. Department of English, Iowa State University, Ross Hall 203, (515) 294-2180 (Main Office); (515) 294-4617 (My office) I am a literary critic; I use the mainframe computer for the analysis of literary texts. I have also designed a major formatting bibliographic package, BIBOUT, in wide use at Iowa State University, also installed at Princeton and Harvard. I do not program, rather I work with very high level programming specialists, statisticians, and systems analysts here to design the applications that I want for my literary critical purposes. I am editing a book on Literary Computing and Literary Criticism containing essays by Richard Bailey, Don Ross, Jr., John Smith, Paul Fortier, C. Nancy Ide, Ruth Sabol, myself and others. I've been on the board of ACH, have been invited to serve on the CHum editorial board. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 607 (607) *Renear, Allen H. My original academic discipline is philosophy (logic, epistemology, history), and though I try to keep that up (and expect my Ph.D. this coming June) I've spent much of the last 7 years in academic computing, particularly humanities support. I am currently on the Computer Center staff here at Brown as a specialist in text processing, typesetting and humanities computing. I've had quite a bit of practical experience designing, managing, and consulting on large scholarly publication projects and my major research interests are similarly in the general theory of text representation and strategies for text based computing. I am a strong advocate of the importance of SGML for all computing that involves text; my views on this are presented in the Coombs, Renear, DeRose article on Markup Systems in the November 1987 *Communications of the ACM*. Other topics of interest to me are structure oriented editing, hypertext, manuscript criticism, and specialized tools for analytic philosophers. My research in philosophy is mostly in epistemic logic (similar to what AI folks call "knowledge representation"); it has some surprising connections with emerging theories of text structure. I am a contact person for Brown's very active Computing in the Humanities User's Group (CHUG). From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 608 (608) *Richardson, John Associate Professor, University of California (Ls Angeles), GSLIS; (213) 825-4352 One of my interests is analytical bibliography, the desription of printed books. At present I am intrigued with the idea that we can describe various component parts of books, notably title pages, paper, and typefaces, but the major psycho-physical element, ink, is not described. Obviously this problem involves humanistic work but also a far degree of sophistication with ink technology. I would be interested in talking with or corresponding with anyone on this topic... From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 609 (609) *Taylor, Philip Royal Holloway & Bedford New College; University of London; U.K; (+44) 0784 34455 Ext: 3172 Although not primarily concerned with the humanities (I am principal systems programmer at RHBNC), I am freqently involved in humanties projects, particularly in the areas of type-setting (TeX), multi-lingual text processing, and natural language analysis, among others. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 610 (610) *Whitelam, Keith W. Dept. of Religious Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland; Tel. 0786 3171 ext. 2491 I have been lecturer in Religious Studies at Stirling since 1978 with prime responsibility for Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My research interests are mainly aimed at exploring new approaches to the study of early Israelite/ Palestinian history in an interdisciplinary context, i.e. drawing upon social history, anthropology, archaeology, historical demography, etc. I have been constructing a database of Palestinian archaeological sites, using software written by the Computing Science department, in order to analyse settlement patterns, site hierarchies, demography, etc. The department of Environmental Science has recently purchased Laser Scan an offered me access to the facilities. This will enable me to display settlement patterns, sites, etc in map form for analysis and comparison. I am particularly interested in corresponding/discussing with others working on similar problems, particularly in Near Eastern archaeology. I have also been involved in exploring the possibilities of setting up campus-wide text processing laser printing facilities. It looks as though we shall be able to offer a LaTeX service in the New Year. We are also planning to offer a WYSIWYG service, such as Ventura on IBM or a combination with Macs for the production of academic papers. Again I have a particular interest in the use of foreign fonts, e.g. Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Greek, etc. My teaching and research on the Hebrew Bible leads to a concern with developing computer-aided text analysis, although I have had little time to explore this area. We have OCP available on our mainframe VAX but my use of this has been very limited. I see this as an important area of future development in teaching and research along with Hebrew teaching. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 611 (611) *Wilson, Noel Head of Academic Services, University of Ulster, Shore Road Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim, N. Ireland BT37 0QB; (0232)365131 Ext. 2449 My post has overall responsibility for the central academic computing service, offered by the Computer Centre, to the University academic community. Within this brief, my Section is responsible for the acquisition/development and documentation of CAL and proprietary software. We currently provide a program library in support of courses and research which contains approx. 400 programs; of these approx. 80 are in-house developments, 50 proprietary systems and the remainder obtained from a variety of sources incl. program libraries (eg CONDUIT - Univ. of Iowa). We have only very recently addressed computing within the Faculty of Humanities; academic staff in the Faculty have used computers in a research capacity and are now turning towards the various u'grad. courses. Presently we hold a grant of 79,000 pounds from the United Kingdom Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils, for the development of CAL software in support of Linguistics and Lexicostatistics. Within this project we are attempting to develop courseware to support grammar teaching in French, German, Spanish and Irish (details of existing materials appropriate to u'grad. teaching would be most welcome!). We also are investigating the creation of software to support an analysis of text (comparative studies) - in this area we are looking at frequency counts assoc. with words/expressions/words within registers etc. - again help would be appreciated. I am happy to provide further details on any of the above points and wish to keep informed of useful Humanities-related CAL work elsewhere. We currently use the Acorn BBC micro. but are also moving in the direction of PC clones. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 612 (612) *Wood, Max Computing Officer, 403 Maxwell Building, The University of Salford The Crescent, Salford, G.M.C. ENGLAND; 061-736-5843 Extension 7399 We are involved in a project to introduce the use of computing in teaching here in the Business and Management Department of Salford University and I am keen to extend links to other Business schools both here in the U.K. and indeed in the U.S.A. Obviously therefore I would like to join your forum so as to possibly exchange ideas news etc. My background is essentially in computing and I mainly supervise the computing resources available to our Department, and have formulated much of the teaching systems we currently use. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 613 (613) *Wujastyk, Dominik I am a Sanskritist with some knowledge of computing. Once upon a time (1977-78) I learned Snobol4 from Susan Hockey at Oxford, where I did undergraduate and later doctoral Sanskrit. More recently, I have been using TeX on my PC AT (actually a Compaq III), and in the middle of this summer I published a book _Studies on Indian Medical History_, which was done in TeX and printed out on an HP LJ II, and sent to the publisher as camera ready. It all went very well. I have received the MS DOS Icon implementation from Griswold at Arizona, but have not spent time on it. I am trying to teach myself at the moment, just to learn enough to knock out ocassional routines to convert files from wordprocessor formats to TeX, and that sort of thing. (Probably reinventing the wheel.) At the present time I am editing a Sanskrit text on medieval alchemy, and doing all the formatting of the edition in LaTeX. Before I ever started Sanskrit, I did a degree in Physics at Imperial College in London, but that is so long ago that I don't like to think about it! From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 614 (614) *Young, Charles M. Dept. of Philosophy, The Claremont Graduate School I am a member of the American Philosophical Association's committee on Computer Use in Philosophy. One of my pet projects is to find some way of making the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database (all of classical Greek through the 7th century C.E.) more readily available to working scholars. From: Subject: Date: X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 615 (615) *END* From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS Subject: National text archive (45 lines) Date: 16 December 1987, 15:24:57 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 616 (616) From C. Faulhaber (U.C. Berkeley, ked@coral.berkeley.edu) via Tim Maher 1) Text Archives. What is needed is some sort of alliance between the computing types and the professional librarians. It seems to me that there is a much better chance of getting a national text archive if it can be integrated into an ongoing concern. I list three candidates, in decreasing order of feasibility: a) RLG: Through their PRIMA project they are actively interested in providing access to new information resources. b) The organization at the U. of Michigan which already maintains data bases for use in the social sciences. c) OCLC: They have relatively less experience than RLG in providing services for research institutions but are aggressively expanding their range. 2) Citation dictionaries: John Nitti (Medieval Spanish Seminary, 1120 Van Hise Hall, U. of Wisconsin, Madison 53720) has been working on just such a dictionary (Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language) since ca. 1970, although the original plan was to draw the citations from texts transcribed specifically for that purpose and publish in standard format on OED lines. With optical disk technology, the possibility now exists to combine DOSL and athe texts themselves. In fact, we are contemplating the possibility of combining these 2 elements with my own Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts serving as a data base front end in order to search through texts on the basis of, e.g., date, author, subject. Prof. Charles Faulhaber Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Univ. of California, Berkeley. ked@coral.berkeley.edu From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS Subject: Info (30 lines)From Mark Olsen Date: 17 December 1987, 15:53:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 617 (617) A student here is doing a project on the discourse of John Woolman and is looking for computer readable versions of texts by other 18th century American Quakers for comparisons. I would appreciate any info concerning the availability of these texts before scanning them in. A second, stranger request has come through. I have a faculty member who is studying a 19th century manuscript. Parts of it were crossed out and she is wondering if there is the possibility of using computer enhancement of the images to improve readability. She has tried blowing-up the images, but has not gotten much. Any ideas? I must that I know nothing about image processing except what I read about concerning the space shots. Maybe I should try JPL (snicker). Thanks in advance, Mark Olsen I don't know how many lines of text this has, but it doesn't conform to any known mark-up standard. From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS Subject: Christmas gift for HUMANISTs (50 lines)From Sebastian Rahtz Date: 17 December 1987, 19:51:24 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 618 (618) The following Christmas gift for HUMANISTs is prompted by a description Lou Burnard sent me of the Vassar 'text encoding standards' meeting, and by the subsequent HUMANIST discussion (no I dont have permission to 'publish' this) Incidentally, a recent contribution to HUMANIST implied that text-encoding standards were a central issue to all HUMANISTs. May I stand up for the archaeologists, musicians, art-historians, linguists and philosophers amongst us to say that there is more to humanities computing than text! equality for all. Sebastian Rahtz (spqr@uk.ac.soton.cm) A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, a hard time we had of it. at the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly. but there was no information, and so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. all this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this set down From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS Subject: Offline 16 (20 lines)From Bob Kraft Date: 18 December 1987, 14:08:49 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 619 (619) My bimonthly OFFLINE column for Religious Studies News has just been sent off to the printer for the January or February issue of RSNews. It consists of a report on the computer aspects of the recent annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, American Academy of Religion, and American Schools for Oriental Research, held jointly in Boston on 5-8 December 1987. If any HUMANISTS would like a pre-publication electronic copy of OFFLINE 16, I am willing to send it upon request. Happy Holidays! Bob Kraft From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hypermedia bibliography Date: 23 December 1987, 22:31:33 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 620 (620) Anyone wishing a copy of a recent bibliography of items on hypermedia, compiled at IRIS (Brown Univ.), should sent a note to me requesting it. The bibliography, which recently appeared on IRLIST, comes in three parts, each approximately 500 lines long. W.M. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Library of Congress: markup and MRTs? Date: 29 December 1987, 13:53:52 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 621 (621) From James H. Coombs In a note posted on 8 Dec 1987: Richard Giordano states, Traditionally, ALA [American Library Association] and LC [Library of Congress] have both taken the lead in the scholarly world in providing machine-readable information. The technical problems that LC has addressed have been fundamental to data processing. Could you provide more information, e.g., citations of articles? I know that LC is considering SGML, but they seem to be much more of a follower than a leader in this effort at least. I also believe that the LC is more interested in microfilm than in electronic media for the preservation of materials printed on paper that is not acid free. I was somewhat distressed when I first read this (wish I knew where I read it too), but apparently microfilm lasts longer than computer tape and requires less maintenance. (Still might be the wrong decision.) So, I've missed out on what the LC is doing for Machine Readable Texts [MRTs] and the like. Any information appreciated. Thanks. --Jim P.S. Well, the same for ALA and RLG [Research Libraries Group]. What are they doing? Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: music-encoding standards? (50 lines) Date: 29 December 1987, 13:56:42 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 622 (622) From James H. Coombs I'm glad to see Humanist up again! In a posting of 17 December, Sebastian Rahtz says: Incidentally, a recent contribution to HUMANIST implied that text-encoding standards were a central issue to all HUMANISTs. May I stand up for the archaeologists, musicians, art-historians, linguists and philosophers amongst us to say that there is more to humanities computing than text! equality for all. Just so, Sebastian! ANSI X3V1.8M/87-17---Journal of Technical Developments discusses the application of SGML to music (Work Group, Music Processing Standards). According to an article in TAG (The SGML Newsletter), the goal is to describe music not only for documentation and hard copy preparation but also to be included in technical documentation and played in a real time rendition simultaneously while viewing a particular part of the document. Dr. Goldfarb referred to the inclusion of music in a technical document, and therefore to the concept of time, as "technical documentation in four dimensions." (vol. 1, no. 3, page 10) --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: texts wanted (19 lines) Date: 1 February 1988, 11:44:12 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 623 (623) -------------------------------------------- From Mark Olsen before we scan and keyboard some texts by walter pater, does anyone have or know of the following texts on disk: *marius the epicurian* and *gaston de la tour*. i am not sure that the latter exists in print form, so we might have to keyboard it from mss. any other texts by pater would also be useful. thanks. mark From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (50 lines, and not of code) Date: 1 February 1988, 13:41:31 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 624 (624) -------------------------------------------- From Jack Abercrombie Last week I attended an IBM sponsored course on OS/2, IBM's new micro operating system. I came away with some personal observations that I haven't seen in most published descriptions. First, OS/2 is the IBMer's ultimate answer to microcomputing: mainframe computing brought to you in a smaller box. For me, the idea of batching processing in the background while I work in the foreground interactively is an exciting opportunity that I have missed since I left the mainframe and the minicomputer worlds for the micro environs. Nevertheless, I worry that the processor is too small to handle the multi-tasking. I am also concerned that most humanist don't need that kind of power. In almost all cases, they require better peripherals and not a box that can juggle several tasks at once. My second observation is that OS/2 will not be as difficult to teach as some have led us to believe. Most users, I don't think, will start off using OS/2 fully and will continue to work in the provided DOS mode. When these users start to move to batch processing, there is limited knowledge needed to make the machine work reasonably well. The reason for this is that in the installation of OS/2 the configuration files sets up the entire system for a user. As long as the user does not fool with the default settings, they should be able to work in a batch mode. Of course, they will not be able to control the hardware as well as they possible could if they understood how to set speeds of processing, memory allocation, etc. My last observation concerns the hardware. It is clear to me that OS/2 needs and eats memory. To avoid swapping memory to disk which slows your processing time down and can lead to other nasty problems, buy OS/2 with more than enough memory especially if you plan to do more than two or three tasks at a time. Also, I have strong doubts that OS/2 multi-tasking will work reasonably fast on low-end machines such as an IBM AT or System 2 (Model 50). I think that eventually will find that IBM will suggest that if you really want to do multi-tasking do it on an 80, 90, 100, and other models to be announced. Of course, you could always use the mainframe, n'est-ce pas? From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ibycus computer users Date: 2 February 1988, 09:03:37 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 625 (625) -------------------------------------------- From Sterling Bjorndahl I would like to get a head count, if I may, as to how many Ibycus computer users there are reading HUMANIST. I am interested in setting up an online discussion forum for Ibycus users (especially the microcomputer version). If we are few enough, and we are all on BITNET/NETNORTH/EARN, we can set it up very "cheaply" using CSNEWS@MAINE's CSBB bulletin board utility (to subscribe on CSNEWS you must send an interactive message - hence the network limitation). The advantage of CSNEWS is that we won't have to mess with LISTSERV software :-). I am interested in hearing from all interested parties. Sterling Bjorndahl Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont, CA BJORNDAS@CLARGRAD.BITNET From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (45 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 09:07:53 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 626 (626) -------------------------------------------- From Wayne Tosh I found the observations on OS/2 interesting, particularly the one concerning whether humanists even need multi-tasking, given the nature of most of their activities (such as word-processing). On the one hand, such a blanket dismissal is always a bit troubling. On the other, we do have in my own department a colleague who is pushing for the purchase of a 286-class machine to support the multi-tasking environment of Desqview. While I myself like the idea of popping from one application to another quickly, I wonder whether most of my colleagues wouldn't rather have more (cheaper) workstations. They have found the learning of word-processing (PC-WRITE) a steep enough process that most are, for the moment, still unwilling to go on to database and spreadsheet software, for instance. So I wonder whether it isn't premature to be spending our limited funds on a 286 machine in order that, as this colleague puts it, "Everyone can have a chance to sit down and play (sic) with it (Desqview)." One measure of the prematureness of this proposal is, I think, my colleagues' unenthusiastic reception of a menuing interface which I recently put at their disposal. If they feel, as they seem to, that it is too much to read a few lines of options from which to choose in order to execute some program or other, then I doubt that they will take readily to a shell like Desqview and the juggling of several processes at once. Are you aware of any discussion on this subject? Wayne Tosh, Director Computer Instructional Facilities English Dept--SCSU St. Cloud, MN 56301 612-255-3061 WAYNE@MSUS1.bitnet From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: RE: texts wanted (19 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 09:09:30 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 627 (627) -------------------------------------------- From Wayne Tosh One possible source of further information might be Mark Emmer Catspaw, Inc. P. O. Box 1123 Salida, CO 81201 Mark publishes irregularly the newsletter "A SNOBOL's Chance" and markets his implementation of SNOBOL4+ for the PC, in addition to Elizabethan texts and the King James Bible on disk. Wayne Tosh, Director Computer Instructional Facilities English Dept--SCSU St. Cloud, MN 56301 WAYNE@MSUS1 From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: OS/2 and multitasking (56 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 09:16:21 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 628 (628) -------------------------------------------- From Hans Joergen Marker Jack Abercrombie had some comments on OS/2, and although I share his generally skeptical view on the matter, there is a point in his comment in which I disagree. It is: "I am also concerned that most humanist(s) don't need that kind of power. In almost all cases, they require better peripherals and not a box that can juggle several tasks at once" This may or may not hold true for most humanists, but it is not true in the field of history. Many historians may feel that they don't need much computing power because the software to make use of the increased power is not available yet. But in order to make the computer an adequate research tool for the historian, and not just an expanded typewriter/calculator, what we need is exactly a multitasking software environment. (On the lines of what Manfred Thaller describes as the historical workstation.) In this concept calculation of ancient mesure and currency, geographical references and searches for appropriate quotations are handled by background applications. Leaving the historian free to take care of his actual job of making history out of the bit and peaces of information on the past. I feel that in historical research we often have a problem with making one person's research useful for the next person doing research in a related field. Most historians feel that they have to understand for themselves how the different units of a particular system of mesurement relate to each other and in that way we all remain on the same level of abstraction. It is my hope that through the use of software as the means of communicating the results of research, a qualitatively different way of making historical research will be made possible. An example: If I know that the Danish currencies of the early 17th century relate in a certain way to each other, I provide not only the article with tables and stuff like that, but also a piece of software that does the actual conversions. This approach would naturally be more useful if a general framework existed in which the different pieces of software fitted in, and combined to an inte- grated unit: The historical workstation. Given the existense of a historical workstation future research can take two major paths, either utilising the tools provided in it for traditional historical research aims, or refining or expanding the tools provided. In this concept software development becomes an integrated part of historical research. The term for this could be "historical informatics". Hans Joergen Marker From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (38 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 09:22:36 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 629 (629) -------------------------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz The note on OS/2 was interesting; it seems curious that IBM are writing a new operating system to do what non-micro users have had for years. Why should I get excited about OS/2? Because it will allow me to run MS-DOS programs in batch mode? wow. Since MS-DOS has at least one root as a cut-down Unix, it seems perverse to build it up again in a new direction - why not just use Unix? My regular daily machines are a Sun 3/50, and a Masscomp 5600; both of these have a single chip (68020) doing the work which provides enough power for me and a number of other people, in the context of a mature operating system (Unix) which already gives me a vast selection of tools for my work. If I had any money, a Sun 3/50 of my own would set me back about 5000 pounds, which I dont regard as a quantum leap above a fully configured PS/2 (such as a model 80 with 8 Mb of memory etc). Of course this is a trivial point, and IBM aren't going to give up on OS/2, and it will all be successful, yawn yawn. But lets not kid ourselves that it adds anything to our desktop facilities; now if you gave me a machine with half a dozen transputers in, and a language to let me play with them, there would be an intellectual stimulus in the challenge of co-ordinating my new friends... Let me hear praise for OS/2 from someone who has used both that and a decent Sun workstation, and then I'll start being convinced. yrs a dinosaur From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding (36 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 14:00:26 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 630 (630) The following is extracted from a note from Paul Fortier, who is not a member of HUMANIST, but who suggested that we might air this on HUMANIST in order to get reactions. Replies may be sent to Paul at FORTIER@UOFMCC.BITNET or to me (IDE@VASSAR.BITNET). ----------------------------------- It seems to me that the ACH text encoding guidelines should have, parallel to the printed version, a program version which will run on as many machines as possible, at least all micros. The user would load this program when she/he wants to begin inputting a new text, and the program would interrogate the user on the features of the text: language, genre, author/anon., date, edition used, and on and on and on, right down to how accents are coded in languages that use them. I had thought this would be a useful way of encouraging users to have an explicit header record on text files so that archives could pass them on, etc. This is rarely suggested in the literature, possibly since most of us old timers wrote such information with a felt-nib pen on the top of the hollreith cards in the first box of the file, and never really thought to put it in the text file when we switched up to better technology. A second advantage to this approach is that it could also at the same time be used to fill in tables for filter and markup minimization routines (like Chesnutt's program for printer-drivers) automatically. That way people who wanted a five or ten-character code for an 'e' grave accent could have it, and I could input e`. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 Date: 2 February 1988, 14:04:12 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 631 (631) -------------------------------- From Mark Olsen Jerry Pournelle got it right: OS/2 -- Yesterday's Software Real Soon Now. Unfortunately, the MS-DOS-OS/2 kludge is the only serious game in town for day-to-day IBM micros. Why would anyone want multi-users on a 286/386 box, anyway? If running applications in the background is all we really want OS/2 for, then use something like DoubleDOS (which is being given away for $29.97). OS/2 will win, inspite of it all, because of those three magic letters: IBM. Mark From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (38 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 14:05:02 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 632 (632) -------------------------------- From Jack Abercrombie Let me clear up a point concerning OS/2. You can only run MS-DOS applications in the foreground and not in the background in batch mode. There is a linker system for converting DOS applications into OS/2 applications. It appears that the linker works best for "C" programs rather than TURBO PASCAL though we have yet to try it out since we lack sufficient memory to run OS/2 on our System 2 machines and IBM AT's. Another aspect about OS/2 that another reader raised is that there is insufficient third party software for applications. I think then you might ask me what we plan to do given this situation and also the fact that we are going to install a System 2 (80) on the network for general access to large text bases from remote locations. Jack, what operating system do you plan to run? The answer is UNIX! OS/2 is not there yet and won't be in place for our type of application until 1989. Furthermore, we have a number of SUNs and APOLLOs that also are UNIX based as well as VAX computers so that the sensible thing for us over the short-term and perhaps the long-term is a UNIX operating system. Of course, we are willing to review this decesion at a later date. JACK ABERCROMBIE ASSISTANT DEAN FOR COMPUTING (HUMANITIES) DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF TEXTS UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2. multi-tasking, and all that (49 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 14:06:22 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 633 (633) -------------------------------- From Jim Cerny At the risk of getting somewhat tangential to the interests of most HUMANIST subscribers, I can't resist making a few observations about multi-tasking. I have been using VAX/VMS systems (from 8650 size to VAXstation 2000 size) and a Macintosh for quite a while. As multi-tasking, or the promise of it, comes to Macs and IBM PCs, I occasionally try to extrapolate from our VAX/VMS usage to imagine how people will use multi-tasking on desk-top machines. "Our" covers various kinds of users. There are myself and the other staff in our Large Systems Support Group who are relatively expert in VMS usage and who are to varying degrees involved in VMS system management. There are faculty users. There are student users. Assorted others. The big multi-tasking use I see is background printing. Then, for some users there is the need to run batch jobs. For faculty in the definitely non-humanist number-crunching areas, there are spells when long batch jobs get run again and again. For staff involved in system management there are various periodic (daily, weekly, monthly) maintenance tasks to run in background. But overall it is background printing that is needed on the large machines and which I see as the primary extra task(s) needed on the desktop machines. When I look long and hard at the most sophisticated things we do as computer support staff, it is to "spawn" one or more additional processes to do something while leaving the original process suspended. That is multi-tasking, but not very demanding. It is what Switcher has provided on the Macintosh, except (and this is a big except) for the appropriate memory and process management to keep one process from straying and clobbering another one. Jim Cerny, University Computing, University of NH. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (39 lines) Date: 2 February 1988, 16:08:59 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 634 (634) -------------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) Regarding the OS/2 debate, I am definitely in need of a multitasking operating system, although I do not think of myself as a particularly computer-intensive worker. I.e., I mainly process text, not program or anything. I use TeX all the time for formatting everything I write, except letters. While PCTeX on a 12Mhz Compaq port. III is quite fast, as TeX goes (about the same as a medium loaded Vax), I still have to twiddle my thumbs while it chugs away. I cut my stuff up into 10--20 page pieces, which helps a bit, but the TeX processing still seems an intrusive nuisance when one it concentrating on the ideas IN the text. Even worse is the fact that I cannot print in bacground mode. TeX output is put on paper as a graphics image, so on a matrix printer -- which is what I have at home for drafting -- it is *very* slow by any normal standards. This wouldn't matter so much if I could print in the background, but with PC DOS I can't. Some printer buffers and spoolers can help, and I have used this route to alleviate the problem to some extent, but it is still not the answer, because a page of graphics is a LOT more information than a page of ASCII character codes. My ideal would be to be able to have a wordprocessor in the forground, sending text to TeX running as another job, with my previewer putting the pages up on the screen in another window simultaneously (or as soon as TeX had finished them). And, of course, background printing. Now THAT would be cooking! Dominik From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2, Multitasking, and all that (21 lines) Date: 3 February 1988, 00:04:51 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 635 (635) -------------------------------- From ked@garnet.Berkeley.EDU (Charles Faulhaber) Multitasking I use a Sun 3/50 and right now have 9 windows open, in five of which processes are running. I use it primarily as a writing tool (so far), but have found it immensely useful to have two files open simultaneously in order to compare 2 versions of a text or to cut and paste from one file to another or to access my mainframe account while working on the Sun. I was a reasonably experienced UNIX user, but I find no comparison between "old" UNIX and a windowing environment. From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Dictionaries; OS/2 and restraint (39 lines) Date: 3 February 1988, 00:11:00 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 636 (636) -------------------------------- From goer@sophist.uchicago.edu(Richard Goerwitz) In NELC at the University of Chicago there are several projects underway that one might generally call dictionary-making. We have, of course, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, and the Hittite Dictionary. We also have a couple of peo- ple doing lexical work in related areas. Not all of this work is exactly state of the art. The CAD has been done mostly without any electronic help. The Hittite Dictionary is being done with TRS-80 machines. Others are using dBase on MS-DOS machines. I am wondering whether there are any established approaches one can use to text-base construction. dBase is not exactly a linguist's dream. Are there better approaches available, either in theory or "off the shelf"? Let me add a parting word about another topic: OS/2. I'd hate to see the dis- cussion get too out of hand until we know what we are talking about. After all not too may folks have seen OS/2 yet. And even fewer have gotten to play with it. As for speculation about whether the majority of scholars will want to work in a multitasking environment, I don't think there's much way of knowing. We just don't have software that is built to take advantage of it in a way that will attract scholars in the humanities in large numbers. Restraint!! -Richard From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Printing in the background Date: 3 February 1988, 00:13:35 EST X-Humanist: Vol. 1 Num. 637 (637) ---------------------------- From goer@sophist.uchicago.edu(Richard Goerwitz) In response to grumblings about not being able to "print in the background," let me point out that in MS/PC-DOS, printing is inherently multitasking. You can run the DOS print command in the background. If you have a word-proces- sor that doesn't print in the background, print to disc (most wp's have this feature). Then print the file using this DOS print command. A good print spooler will speed this process up a lot. (A print spooler is a program that intercepts DOS printer interrupts, sending the file being printed into RAM memory, where it waits for opportune moments to be fed out to the printer. A good spooler will work fast, but yet shut down quickly when the user demands computer processing time. Good examples of MS-DOS spoolers include the PD programs M