Date: 1 February 1988, 11:44:12 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: texts wanted (19 lines) -------------------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 1 February 1988, 13:41:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (50 lines, and not of code) -------------------------------------------- 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? ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 09:03:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ibycus computer users -------------------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 09:07:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (45 lines) -------------------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 09:09:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: RE: texts wanted (19 lines) -------------------------------------------- From Wayne Tosh One possible source of further information might be Mark Emmer Catspaw, Inc. P. O. Box 1123 Salida, CO 81201 voice: 303-539-3884 bulletin board: 303-539-4830 ARPA: emmer@arizona.edu 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 09:16:21 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: OS/2 and multitasking (56 lines) -------------------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 09:22:36 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (38 lines) -------------------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 14:00:26 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding (36 lines) 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). ----------------------------------- From: 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`. ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 14:04:12 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 -------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 14:05:02 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (38 lines) -------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 14:06:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2. multi-tasking, and all that (49 lines) -------------------------------- 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. Conclusion-by-extrapolation: If you have multi-tasking you will use it at least a little, but for most desktop users I see it as an incrementally useful capability and not a revolution. Jim Cerny, University Computing, University of NH. ========================================================================= Date: 2 February 1988, 16:08:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (39 lines) -------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 00:04:51 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2, Multitasking, and all that (21 lines) -------------------------------- 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. ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 00:11:00 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Dictionaries; OS/2 and restraint (39 lines) -------------------------------- 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 ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 00:13:35 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Printing in the background ---------------------------- 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 MSPOOL and SPOOL.) If background down/uploads are needed, use Mirror, a Crosstalk clone that does background work like this. If more serious background work is necessary, use a program called Double Dos. As one recent poster pointed out, it can be had for under $30. -Richard ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 00:16:05 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Deadline for the ACH Newsletter is soon! (22 lines) Vicky Walsh, editor of the Newsletter of the Association for Computing in the Humanities, reminds me that the deadline for submitting material to be considered for the next issue is 19 February. Any member of the ACH -- one of our major sponsors -- is welcome to submit material for the Newsletter. As difficult as it may be to believe, some computing humanists cannot be reached by electronic mail, indeed, some even actively refuse to become connected. So, the ACH Newsletter does reach people whom you cannot contact through HUMANIST. Vicky can be reached by e-mail; she is imd7vaw@uclamvs.bitnet. Yours, Willard McCarty ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 09:02:25 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Multitasking (41 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I find the claim that all the average person wants multi-tasking for is background printing incredible! Like Charles Faulhaber, I often have half a dozen windows open when I am using a Sun, and all I am doing is writing something, like him. Is it so difficult to imagine how I can have one window for my mail (brooding on what to reply), one for playing Mazewar, one for editing my file, one for running it through LaTeX, another for previewing, another for a database process thats getting some data I want? I do not know about you people and your computers, but they are my no means fast enough for me - I often want to start a new job while the computer is tediously processing another. If we take a reasonable job of editing a book, it took me about 40 minutes on a Sun 3 to process from scratch the whole of a conference proceedings I just finished (3 passes through LaTeX and 1 through BibTeX - dont tell me to use a silly Mac, I have my standards..); what am I supposed to do while this burbles away? read a book? no, i want to write a letter, edit a chapter thats just been processed, run a program etc; i WANT multi-tasking. I suspect that those who think of multi-tasking as 'batch processing' haven't used a proper windowing system... or to be more 'academic', lets take a project being worked on here, a archaeological database that extracts details of pots and sends an image of each in PostScript to a NeWS process; if we did this normally, the database would suspend, draw a picture and then resume; with each pot in a separate window, i can play with the generated images while the database is working, and I can keep a number of images on my desk. Sebastian Rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 09:04:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Paul Fortier's sensible remarks about textual encoding (21 ll.) ---------------------------- From Grace Logan Paul Fortier says such sensible things! I would just like to enthusiastically support his suggestions, especially the part about header information being easily (or even automatically) entered. I have been in computing long enough to have gone back to texts as much as ten years later and I fervently wish that Paul's recommendations had been in force when they were input. Having the kind of information Paul talks about at the top of every file would have saved me so much time! ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 09:07:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Multitasking and all that (16 lines) This is really a rather interesting discussion. I recall something that Gaston Bachelard says in _The Psychoanalysis of Fire_, that "Man is a creature of desire, not of need." Let us not ever put shackles on our imagination, especially not here! Willard McCarty, mccarty@utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:14:07 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Multitasking according to IBM (20 lines) ---------------------------- From Jack Abercrombie Just a quick note on IBM's concept of multi-tasking. What was discussed in the seminar I attended was not having multiple windows open at the same time though they made it clear that that is a direction IBM hopes to move in with the release of the Presentation Manager at the end of 1988. No. They presented a mainframe batch processor, and not a true windows environment. JACK ABERCROMBIE ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:16:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Fortier-style texts (19 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz It seems obviously sensible that texts should have a "Fortier heading" explaining what they are about, but I dont really think a specific program for adding this stuff is really a very good idea. Surely you text-encoding standard gurus have dealt with the idea of the format of a text header, however it is created? If not, shame on you... sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:17:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Data headers and SGML (not too vehement) (41 lines) ---------------------------- From David Durand There has already been a lot of discussion of SGML on this list which does not have to be re-opened. However, it is worth noting that a document type definition or SGML prologue is detailed documentation of a file format, with the additional advantage that one is required to use mnemonic names to indicate the special information in the text. That is not to say that an SGML prologue gives you all the information you might want, just that it gives much that is essential, and requires (hopefully) meaningful names for all indicated information. Some other points are worth noting: the creation of the structure definitions for a file provides a very useful discipline to control the consistency of entered data, despite its time consuming creation and seeming obstruction of the straightforward process of data entry. I think that in some ways the SGML debate is like the programming community's debate over structured programming. It all seems like such a bother, in part because it is an attempt to reduce the total effort of all users of the data at the expense of some extra effort on the part of the preparers. Finally, it is worth remembering that SGML is optimized for interchange, and that fairly simple tools can be used to convert to and from SGML and special purpose formats to allow more efficient searching or data retrieval or scansion or whatever. Well, a simple comment about format headers has turned into a small rant on the virtues of standard markup. In closing I'd like to say that I don't necessarily think that SGML is perfect, just that it has addressed the right questions in the right KIND of way. Certainly, it could have been ten times simpler and still done the job. ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:26:26 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Multitasking and windows (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I used to play with Microsoft Windows; apart from the speed etc, we can assume (I hope) that OS/2 will not *look* that different. What was wrong with it was not that it was cripplingly slow, but that the area of the screen you could carve into windows was too small. The 25 x 79 screens on our PCs are TOO SMALL to work well on. Bring on at least A4 size screens if not bigger.... theres no point in saying this mind, its like asking for a better keyboard. Do any punters in HUMANIST-land have an extended edition OS/2 with the micro-DB2 grafted underneath? Does it exist yet? Now there IS an interesting development, if it works as it might, with references to data being passed through a relational database manager instead of sequential file access. Somewhere recently I read an interview Laurence Rowe (of INGRES fame) who saw the future as a hypercard interface to INGRES; I like this - lets stop seeing our hard disks as collections of named files, but see it as giant relational database reflecting the relationships of all the data we possess. Our applications need then only pass on an abstract, file independent, query to the OS, and get back an answer. hoorah, high-level coding rules OK. I expect Bill Gates and his boys thought of all this ages ago. Does anyone have experience with Microsoft Bookshelf? sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:30:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Contributions to the ACH Newsletter (20 lines) Good news: Nancy Ide tells me that contributors to the ACH Newsletter don't have to be members of that organization. So, if you've got something to say to North American computing humanists, or something to ask them, the Newsletter is also open to you, even if (God forbid) you are not a member of the ACH. Again, the editor is Vicky Walsh, her address imd7vaw@uclamvs.bitnet, the deadline for the next issue 19 February. Yours, Willard McCarty ========================================================================= Date: 3 February 1988, 20:45:39 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Printing in the background (24 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) Richard Goerwitz didn't take the point about background printing of graphics data. The DOS PRINT.COM only works with a stream of plain ASCII characters, not graphics data. The other solutions he mentions, e.g. DoubleDos, may well work, although all the "simple" multitasking efforts on the market that I have tried all had some fatal flaw. Background spooling can work, as I said, but for more that a very small amount of graphics data a PC will run out of memory very quickly. A test file of the words "this is a test" ended up a file of 991 bytes, to give an concrete example. This is, of course, for a printer that does not support downloaded fonts, so the whole bitmap for every character is there. Dominik Wujastyk ========================================================================= Date: 4 February 1988, 16:38:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: 9 windows at once (18 lines) ---------------------------- From Ronnie de Sousa Re Cha Faulhaber's nine windows open at once: if you are just writing, you don't need OS/2 for that. All you need is a decent scholar-oriented word processor like NOTA BENE, in which you can also open nine files at once, and even automatically compare the two (finding next point of discrepancy and then next point of agreement.) ...Ronnie de Sousa, Toronto ========================================================================= Date: 4 February 1988, 16:43:48 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Looking for Adam Smith on-line (21 lines) ---------------------------- From Malcolm Brown Does anyone have either "Theory of Moral Sentiments" or "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith on-line and available? If so, please send a note to me (GX.MBB@STANFORD.BITNET) thanks! Malcolm Brown Stanford University ========================================================================= Date: 4 February 1988, 17:07:51 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2, multitasking, multiple windows, and more (31 lines) Last month we had a discussion about some of our needs for software. Now we seem to be having another about hardware. We all know how silly and moronic the ruling things of the present tend to be, being nevertheless very useful, but what about the future? What gizmos would we as humanists like to have? Perhaps our collective influence is usually minuscule, but I suspect that if we imagine well, what we imagine may stir someone with the means. Multitasking would appear to be one thing we want, with a multitude of windows, and not just for wordprocessing. Diverging back to software, perhaps the problem of small screens can be solved by having "rooms" as well as "windows." (Who has heard of the work being done at PARC on "rooms"? Would one of our members there like to report on this?) Who has had experience with current multitasking shells, e.g., DESQVIEW, MicroSoft Windows? Does this experience suggest anything about future systems? What else? Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 09:07:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Headings for documents (25 lines) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) Sebastian Rahtz expressed my sentiment exactly. There already exist plenty of programs in which you can create this header information, they are called `text editors'. The problem is there doesn't (yet) exist any statement of what the lines of such text should contain. Rather than a hopeless quest to write software for every PC on the market, it would be more sensible to describe what the attributes should be for a machine-readable text to be acceptable. I really think the archives have some obligations here to nag their contributors to provide this information since if they don't get it, then it will result in multiple recipients of the archives data having to do without it or individually nag the originating author-----or maybe that is a good idea. Maybe we should gather together the names of all the people who created undocumented machine-readable text and ALL send them letters asking for the information. ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 09:13:27 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 and the Mac ---------------------------- From elli%ikaros@husc6.BITNET (Elli Mylonas) All the discussion on OS/2 centers around comparisons of this operating system with mainframes and other higher-end machines. Background processing and a semblance of multitasking are available NOW on the Macintosh, using the Multifinder system (version 4.2). It is possible print in the background, or to download files in the background, while working away at something else in the main window. It is also possible to have more than one application open at the same time, although only one is active. I know that this requires more memory than the average Mac has, but even a memory upgrade costs less than the machines against which OS/2 is being measured (an extra 1MB for Mac + -- $175, upgrade to 2.5MB for the SE -- $460). It is surprising how fast one can come to depend on the multiple window, multiple application environment that Multifinder offers. Mac users, even those who are not expert users, start to make use of it immediately, and without realizing they are doing something fundamentally different. This is primarily due to the consistency of the Mac user interface, which consistency Multifinder adheres to. So, to answer those who say that humanists only do word processing, and do not need to do 2 things at once, all the humanists who are given the opportunity to do so make use of it, if it is not hard to learn. After all, compiling an index or pulling cross references require cpu time, when the writer just sits and waits. Furthermore, few people do *just* word processing. They have their references in a database, they may look at images or maps they have online, and they may be logged in on their local networked machine reading HUMANIST. Not to mention more mundane chores like looking up an address in their electronic phonelist, or cleaning out their files. I do not want to say that the Mac with Multifinder is the solution to everyone's computing needs, but it is available now, on an inexpensive machine. We cannot all have Suns, and we do not all have that kind of networking, so as to be able to use workstations off a central server. Elli Mylonas elli@wjh12.harvard.edu ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 10:12:29 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: File Documentation (45 lines) ---------------------------- From Bob Kraft OK, I'm ready to get serious and gather the combined wisdom of the collected HUMANISTs on what you want by way of information about a text file. This is timely, because I am in the final stages of attempting to document the materials included on the CCAT part of the new PHI/CCAT CD-ROM (see the OFFLINE 17 list). This documentation will be included with each disk -- ideally (and in the future), it would be on the CD-ROM itself, but in this instance it was not yet ready. In any event, the categories I have used are as follows: (1) Edition of the text used (if applicable), or background information about the text; (2) Encoding information -- who deserves credit for creating the electronic form and/or for making it available? (3) Coding information -- what special symbols are used, how are non-English characters represented, etc. -- often with reference to appended charts; (4) Verification status -- how well verified is the text (if known)? (5) Special Notes -- e.g. to whom should questions or corrections be addressed (where does quality control reside), are there any special issues to consider in using the text (e.g. restrictions of any sorts, relation to similar texts, future plans for revising the format). I have not thought it necessary to stipulate the size of each file (some files are anthologies -- e.g. Arabic, Sanskrit -- while others are homogeneous), although that might be useful information especially for persons who plan to offload material from the CD-ROM for individual treatment. Are there other important pieces of information you think should be included in such documentation? I should look at the format of the Rutgers Inventory to see whether the librarian's needs are covered as well. Speak now .... Bob Kraft for CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 10:24:48 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML editing (23 lines) ---------------------------- From David Nash We are about to draw deep breaths and plunge into converting the Warlpiri dictionary master files to SGML. We have been inspired to do this by most of what we know about SGML. Does anyone want to talk us out of it? Has anyone experiences to share of SoftQuad's Author/Editor SGML-based software for the Macintosh? Are there any alternatives on the market? Less importantly, is ISO 8879 (on SGML) available in machine-readable form? -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 10:47:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Windows and rooms (36 lines) ---------------------------- From BobKraft Although I get the feeling that many people don't want to keep hearing about the IBYCUS SC -- its that special scholarly micro-workstation that has been working with CD-ROMs since 1985 (!!), among other things -- you should at least know that the SC (for "Scholarly Computer") has ten obvious "windows" (or perhaps better, "rooms") that are accessed through the number pad keys and can be used to access and work with various files conveniently. Actually there are more than 10, but the 10 are obvious. The SC does not "multi-task" in the sense of being able to run programs in each room at the same time. Only one program can be actually running, in the foreground or in the background, but the memory for each of the rooms (to the limits of available RAM) is readily accessible at a keystroke. Thus I can write my 9 different articles at the same time while using window/room 0 to pull materials off the CD-ROM. Why mention this? Because if we want to discuss what scholars think they need, and how they might want to use various types of proposed options, it is good to know what some scholars have, and to find out how their "needs" and hopes/wants change once they have what they thought they wanted. What do the IBYCUS SC users see as the next level of wants in relation to their windowing/rooming environment? Bob Kraft, CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 11:46:50 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Windows, multitasking, and programming environments (33 ll.) ---------------------------- From Randall Smith <6500rms@UCSBUXB.BITNET> I have been experimenting with Windows and XTREE PRO, trying to find a suitable environment for programming in C. I have not yet been successful in getting Windows to work smoothly, but it does not seem to be too slow, though I am running on a 12 MHz clone with a high speed hard disk. I am expecting version 2.0 shortly, and I hear that it is much faster. As far as size of screen, I am using one the super EGA cards (the Vega Deluxe) which gives me a resolution of 752x410. This is *much* better than the standard resolution and provides much more room to put things on the screen. My goal is to be able to perform a compilation according to a make file in one window and do another task or two while that compiling is continuing. Also, I am trying to get my TLG search software to run in a window. I know that this will slow it down, but I would rather have it take ten minutes during which I can use the computer for something else than five minutes during which the machine is lost to me. I will pass along more information on this if I can get it to work. Has anyone tried anything like this with Windows 386 or Desqview? By the way, XTREE PRO with a mouse and its new editor is not a bad dos manager. I recommend giving it a try. I will be happy to provide a Logitech mouse driver for it if anyone is interested. Randall Smith ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 20:56:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: multi-tasking (18 lines) ---------------------------- From Wayne Tosh > > Rahtz makes some very good points concerning multi-tasking and > multiple windows as he is able to realize them on his Sun > workstation. Would that we all had NOW such a large-screen > environment! My objection is to colleagues who want to spend > limited (English department) funds on small-screen 286-based > machines--who wants to do multitasking while peering through a > keyhole? ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:03:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Tennessee Williams' plays on-line? (17 lines) ---------------------------- From Rosanne Potter Does anyone have copies of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and/or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on-line? or know of their existence in an archive? Please respond to me at POTTER@UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX [for those outside JANET that's potter@vax.oxford.ac.uk -- W.M.] Thanks. ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:07:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: documenting texts (26 lines) ---------------------------- From Lou Burnard Just before Xmas I sent an enquiry to Humanist, requesting feedback on just what minimal information people would like to see recorded about texts in the Oxford Text Archive catalogue. I know the message didnt get lost because I happened to meet one Humanist in person a week or so later (always an inexplicable pleasure to see those acronyms fleshed out in a suit) who gave me his views using that curious old technology known as speech. Alas that represented exactly 50% of the response rate my enquiry provoked, i.e. I got one (1) other reply. What I want to know, apart from the answer to my original query, which Bob Kraft has just posed again, is (a) is the response rate to queries placed on Humanist always so low? (b) or was it a boring question? I had considered mailing an enquiry to all other enquiriers, but forbore! Lou ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:14:43 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML for the dictionary ---------------------------- From Nancy Ide I would like to suggest that NASH at MIT consider holding off on the conversion of the dictionary to SGML. I expect they will be defining document types and ne tags for this application, and it may be that the effort will duplicate that of the ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative. We will have a very large group at work on tagging schemes for dictionaries, and while this work will not be well enough along for at least 18 months to provide a concrete scheme for actual use, the wait might be worthwhile. We expect our scheme to be based on or even an extension of SGML and the AAP implementation of SGML for typesetting, and so they will get what they need, plus compatibility, without the trouble of developing the tags on their own. Nancy Ide ide@vassar ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:18:57 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hardware wars (30 lines) ---------------------------- From David Graham This discussion clearly has the potential to degenerate very quickly into one of those depressing and unproductive flame wars about hardware that periodically rage through the Usenet comp.sys.* groups. [As someone recently wrote there, "Oh no, not another of those 'Your favorite microprocessor is sh*t' discussions".] Instead of flaming one another's preferences and arguing about whether or not Multifinder is 'true multitasking' (I can see that one coming), may I suggest that we listen to Willard McCarty's suggestion to re- strict the discussion to accounts of actual experience, and resist (insofar as possible) the temptation to evangelize? I can't afford a Sun either (I can't even afford a memory upgrade for my Mac), and it doesn't help matters to have the feeling that HUMANIST's Sun users are looking down their noses from a great height. One of the reasons I joined HUMANIST was that I thought we were all in this together, as Humanities people with an interest in computing, and because I thought that HUMANIST would provide a forum for some interesting discussions. So far I haven't been disappointed (though frequently reminded of my ignorance), but if we're going to waste time and bandwidth flaming each other, I'll stop reading. Am I being thin-skinned? Is this hopelessly idealistic? David Graham dgraham@mun.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:21:35 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: PhD exams in Computing and the Humanities? (89 lines) ---------------------------- From Sterling Bjorndahl Here is another twist on the issue of academic credit in the Humanities for work with computers. Is it academically legitimate for a PhD student to write one of his or her exams in the general area of "Computers and blank" where 'blank' is his or her field of study? In the case I am thinking of, the topic would be something like "Computer Assisted Research and the Study of the New Testament and Christian Origins," including early Christian literature and movements. I might even be willing to broaden it further and include all of the biblical corpus. Some arguments pro: One can develop a Forschungsbericht, and in our field at any rate that seems to be a kind of magic that makes something a legitimate field of study. Admittedly this history of the investigation is not that old, but it is at least as old as is structuralism in the study of this corpus of literature - if not older! One could do a very nice job, I think, of looking at various computer-assisted projects, evaluating their methods and results, identifying diachronic changes as machines and methods became more sophisticated, and analyzing the difference that the computer made to each investigation. One could then attempt to generalize about the role of computers in this area of study, and extrapolate as to how the role will change in the future. I must admit that this is the only aspect of such an exam that I can imagine at this time. We typically have four exams in our field, each exam being four hours long and consisting of from two to four questions. Could one write for four hours on such a Forschungs- bericht? Probably not. But one would probably find that one hour is insufficient. What else could one write about? There are also very good arguments against allowing such an exam. The computer does function, after all, more like a "tool" than a "method," and we seldom allow exams in "tools." We would be unlikely to allow an exam in lexicons, say, or synopses of the Gospels. Unless: what if the student were planning to do major work, even a dissertation, in the history of the development of lexicons or synopses? It might take a lot of convincing for some people to believe that this was a worthwhile area of study, but one could look at the types of texts utilized, the priniciples of organization, the underlying philosophical perspective? I think that a case could be made for an exam on this. I have already discussed this question privately with a couple of people, and Bob Kraft has made the most eloquent statement of the issues to date. The following paragraphs are from his response to my question: If we teach graduate level courses in computing and the biblical studies, and even give examinations in those courses, why is it not legitimate to allow a doctoral exam in that area? From Bob Kraft: > If my category for the computer is that it is a "tool" in some ways > similar to typewriters, indices, concordances, scrapbooks, cards, > etc., etc., I resist focusing on it by itself, although I am open to > the idea of examining the student on the uses of research tools > (including, but not only, computers). If I see it as an "approach" > similar to archaeological method, then it would seem to be an > appropriate subject in itself. In between these two models might fall > the "library science" model, which encompasses a special set of tools > in a fieldwork environment. Would I permit a PhD exam on library > methodology? I would hesitate, despite the fact that there are > courses, programs, etc. > > Yes, we teach graduate level courses in humanistic computing, and > there are examinations in them. We also have courses in archaeological > methods. And there are courses and programs in library science. I > don't think that fact is determinative of what is appropriate to a PhD > exam. The issue that I need to explicate is why I am not very > uncomfortable about the archaeology model. Partly because discussion > of "archaeological method" has developed in a partially > confrontational context vis-a-vis "historical-philological method," in > a way that clearly required exposure of assumptions, justifications > for valuation of certain types of evidence, etc. It involves more than > knowledge of how to use a tool or set of tools efficiently (although > this "more" is not necessarily inherent in the category!). I'm not > sure that, in isolation, a similar case can be made for "computer > methodology," but I am open to being persuaded. Finally, I wonder if this would be a non-issue if this were an information science PhD rather than a New Testament/Christian Origins PhD? Someone studying computers _per se_ could very well be able to examine their application in a particular field of the humanities. Does this make a difference? Am I really asking a cross-disciplinary question? Sterling Bjornahl ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:25:58 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML standard document: ref. and ordering info. (22 lines) ---------------------------- From David Durand In response to number of requests, here is the reference for the SGML standard document: American National Standards Institute. "Information Processing -- Text and Office Systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)" ISO 8879-1986, ANSI, New York, 1986. I called them in New York (at: (212)-354-3300) and got the following ordering information: It is very important that you mention that you want document number ISO 8879-1986. Apparently the name may not be sufficient. $58.00 -- + 6.00 shipping and Handling Mail to: ANSI Attn: Sales Department. 1430 Broadway New York, NY 10018 ========================================================================= Date: 5 February 1988, 21:49:45 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Public-domain UNIX relational database program? (41 lines) A colleague in Toronto, Frank Davey (English, York), is looking for a relational database program in the public domain. Any suggestions would be very welcome. In the following he describes the intended application. Willard McCarty ---------------------------------- From Frank Davey We are looking for a programme that will let us compile bibliographic entries for searches that will be useful for research into the history of Canadian publishing as an institution. We'd like to be able to search for combinations of key fields, to answer questions such as between 1900 and 1914, what publishers published fiction by women, or between 1860 and 1900, what cities were the places of publication for 1st books of poetry. On the other hand, we don't want necessarily to have to establish in advance the sorts of questions we want to be able to ask, and we'd like to be able to add fields (such as which book -- first, second, etc. -- an item represents in a writer's career) if we hadn't thought of it first time around. That feature would be particularly useful if a graduate student wanted to modify the database slightly so that it could answer a new set of research questions. My understanding is that a relational database would allow one to do exactly this, as well as allow an immense variety of utterly different projects. A useful feature of the Empress database programme is that it can be output through the Standard Generalized Markup codes that Softquad is developing for Apple (I think that Mac programme is called Author/Editor). From Frank Davey ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 16:12:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: mark-up (37 lines) ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen Other than a minimal amount of textual identification -- titles, editions, etc. -- coding of texts will depend on the applications and intentions of the collector. Rather than impose a SGML or some such thing why not have a header that clearly identifies each element of codes being used. I have several texts from the Oxford Archive that have extensive codes with no explanation of what they mean or how they were determined. This could be appended to the data file as part of the contributed text. I suspect that we gather text for the immediate application at hand -- I know I work that way -- without realizing that someone 20 years later needs some footprint to follow the trail. The general rule might be that if the character did NOT appear in the original printed edition or mss, then it is a code that must be defined. That defintion should form the bulk of a header. The poor response rate from HUMANISTS recently lamented by Lou Burnard and Bob Kraft might be due to the nature of e-mail. If I can't fire off a quick response, I file the note, to be lost forever in an ever growing HUMANIST NOTEBOOK. Stored there, out of the way, they do not form an annoying pile which threatens to overwhelm my desk. Free from the threat of avalanche, I can forget the with the good faith that I will get to it "real soon now." With a clear desk and a clean conscience, I continue on my way, safe in the knowledge that "out of sight is truly out of mind." Mark ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 16:13:45 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Document Characteristics (63 lines) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) Minimally the description should make it possible to identify exactly what material was used as the source of keyboarded data such that someone else will be able to find another (or, if the source was unique, the specific) copy of the source to recheck the input for accuracy. Thus, the first goal is ``How can I tell someone where to check my data against the original from which it was made''. The next goal is to describe those attributes which will enable someone to appreciate how the data was captured. To describe the methods by which it was put down in the computer. Specifically, what transliterations were used; what aspects of the original were not captured (e.g. original hyphenation, orginal page boundaries, etc.); whether data is as-is or has been corrected in some way for possible abberations in the original (e.g. black smudge in printing obscured letters here, but context implies it said ...; misspelling or incorrect numbers corrected by (a) checking with dictionary or (b) through incorporating errata notes from material into the copy, etc.); method by which disjoint parts of materials were entered (e.g. footnotes entered all in special footnote file, or entered at point at which footnote number appeared in text; or entered at bottoms of each page, etc.; physical arrangement of text which was captured vs. which were not--i.e. how is the blank space in the original document being dealt with (a problem here is that original text with variable width letters must be distorted in some fashion to be keyboarded on computers with only fixed-width character displays). What is being done to represent different fonts (both fontsize and italic/bold/small-caps/Roman, etc.) Thus, the goal here is to answer the question ``How can I tell someone what steps to follow once they find the original source material to result in an exact matching copy of this machine-readable file should they also accurately type it in'' A sub-part of this last answer should include how to distinguish the original source material from any contributions of the data enterer, that is--if the data enterer created what business folks are fond of calling ``added value'' by further clarifying the text in some way (e.g. adding line/verse/chapter/etc. numbers; adding definitions from another work; providing translations of foreign quotes, or even interpreting the meaning, etc. of the material--this added value should be capable of being distinguished from the original such that the original text and the added material could be separated again.) Added value sources, where such exist, should also be identified as in the first step, and where needed, their method of capture itself should be described as in the second step (this forming a type of recursion that hopefully finishes). ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 16:16:25 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ph.D. in humanities computing (29 lines) ---------------------------- From Norman Zacour Given what I have seen so far, I daresay that someone will soon ask to do a Ph.D on the use of computers in medieval historical research. Why should I find such an idea uncomfortable? We teach medieval history; we teach a great deal about computers; we want our medievalists to apply the use of computers to their scholarship as much as possible; and finally, such a study might be quite interesting in itself. But is it worth a Ph.D? Does any interesting book describing the work of academics warrant the doctorate? I suspect that I find all this problematical precisely because I think of the doctorate as a disciplinary qualification, and while I am used to disciplines such as computer science and medieval history, there is no point in pretending that the question of historians' using computers is in itself a disciplinary qualification. It's a great idea, and I hope that we will soon have some good works on the manner in which computers have stimulated scholarship and modified techniques of study and research. This is the kind of thing that practictioners write, not students. But on the other hand, when I see what we accept now... Norman Zacour@Utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 16:33:08 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A colloque (78 lines) ---------------------------- From Robert Gauthier This year,from July .7th to July . 13th, the theme of the Colloque international d'Albi, in the south of France will be Pictures and Texts. Workshops on visual semiotics( French B. D.,films,posters...)and textual analysis will be scheduled in the morning and early afternoon. A daily conference will take place in the late afternoon. The trend of the whole colloque will be to link formal analysis with either current ideologies and axiologies or psychic human traits. Didactical aspects will not be neglected and the inter- disciplinary approach will be sustained by the participation of semioticians, psychologists, linguists, philosophers , sociologists and communication experts. Among others, world-known specialists like Courtes J., Ducrot O...have announced their participation. FRTOU71 Le Colloque d'Albi se propose de mettre l'accent sur l'etude de l'image, et par dela, de l'imaginaire. Etant donne l'importance croissante du visuel - dans notre vecu individuel et social - il convient de s'interroger sur son fonctionnement et sur sa fonction dans notre univers socio-culturel. Meme si aucune parole ne l'accompagne l'image est un texte a lire dont la signification est fonction de regles particulieres. Comme texte l'image est evidemment le support de valeurs : elle n'est jamais que pretexte a une axiologie determinee ; elle vise a convaincre au dela de ce qu'elle represente. Inversement le texte se presente souvent de maniere imagee au point de produire un effet de sens "realite". Nous voici alors au point de depart de l'imaginaire, de l'onirique : inventivite sans fin des images, avec ou sans paroles. Notre objectif sera de proposer des strategies pedagogiques utilisables a l'ecole et au lycee, issues de la confrontation entre les theories scientifiques et les demarches pratiques des enseignants. On s'appuiera sur l'etude linguistique et litteraire de textes (poemes, nouvelles, textes administratifs, etcI), de messages audio-visuels (productions cinematographiques, publicitaires, illustrations, bandes dessinees, etcI) de maniere a construire des systemes de valeurs tels qu'ils peuvent se degager par l'analyse semantique. Le theme choisi permettra un travail de collaboration entre linguistes, litteraires, philosophes, historiens, sociologues et specialistes de la communication. Dans des ateliers on analysera le texte et l'image, on etudiera notamment "le personnage" dans le recit comme lieu d'investissement (valeurs, ideologies, fantasmatiqueI). On s'interrogera sur les rapports entre l'environnement culturel actuel et les pre-requis exiges pour la comprehension des textes. Dans le but d'aider les eleves a preparer l'epreuve du baccalaureat, on reflechira au theme en question dans le cadre de l'exercice dit de "groupement de texte", a partir de l'exemple des descriptions litteraires ; etcI En resume, le but poursuivi est de degager des outils d'analyse a la fois pour le texte et pour l'image. Les specialistes de l'image pourront utiliser les ressources offertes par le Musee TOULOUSE-LAUTRE d'Albi et ses expositions temporaires. Participation Form to be sent to: G. MAURAN 19 rue du Col du Puymorens 31240 L'UNION France NAME.................................... ................. Fees : 300F (students : 100F) ADDRESS................................. ............. Fees+lunch: 550F/350 PROFESSION.............................. ............ Fees+1/2 Board: 900/700 TEL..................................... .................... " + Full Board:1150F/950 Rooms in Guest House 12 rue de la Republique -ALBI Guests may arrive on Wednesday from 6 p.m. You will be met at the station Time of arrival................................. Do you want reduced train-fare................. Children holiday-center: lunch and tea : 300 .................................... ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 16:39:41 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Preparing electronic manuscripts (28 lines) ---------------------------- From Tom Benson 814-238-5277 This is a question about manuscript presention and text editing/formatting, rather than about research per se. As such, it may be too elementary for this list, and if so, my apologies. I am preparing a book-length manuscript for a publisher who has asked that it be prepared in machine-readable form according to the markup system of the University of Chicago Press's GUIDE TO PREPARING ELECTRONIC MANUSCRIPTS. The explanation of what the text should look like is straightforward enough, but it results, if I understand it, in a situation where the only text that can be printed out is a marked-up one--which is clumsy to read, at the very least. Is there a reasonable way to prepare such a text so that one would have a form marked up as the Press advises and at the same time a "normal" looking text for reading, reviewing, and revising? The two manuscript preparation systems to which I have easiest access are XEDIT and SCRIPT on the university's mainframe VM/CMS system, and DW4 on an IBM PC. If anyone out there has experience working with the Chicago format, I'd be grateful for suggestions--including the suggestion that I should just go ahead and do it their way and not worry about having "normal" looking output at any stage before the final printed book. Tom Benson Penn State University T3B@PSUVM ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 23:08:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Who uses CD-ROMs? ---------------------------- From David Nash Beryl T. Atkins (Collins Publishers, 11 South Street, Lewes, Sussex, England BN7 2BT) cannot receive HUMANIST at the moment, and would like to ask you all a question: "What I want to ask them is: how many of them actually use CD ROMs in their daily work & research? [Collins] are hesitating about CD ROM publication of concordances because they don't believe enough people use CD ROMs. And they say, rightly, that one CD ROM drive in the University library isn't going to make people in departments buy their own research material." I would prefer that you reply to MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.bitnet rather than me directly, but either way I'll amalgamate replies and pass them on to Atkins. -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 23:10:07 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML and word processors (29 lines) ---------------------------- From goer@sophist.uchicago.edu(Richard Goerwitz) It shouldn't be too hard to get just about any word processor to output SGML or U of Chicago or whatever marked text, as long as one is willing to create an appropriate printer table. Nota Bene printer tables are pretty easy to cus- tomize. In fact, I've customized my NB 2.0 so that it outputs Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac - which turned out to be an easier job than I had anticipated. I would assume that any major word-processor would be sufficiently customizable that one could have it output SGML markers rather than printer codes. Really, though, shouldn't the makers of major academic word processors create SGML, UofC, and other appropriate tables for us? Or is such a suggestion a bit premature? Richard Goerwitz ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 23:11:51 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: Preparing electronic mss. (28 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) I have recently changed to XyWrite II plus precisely because the underlying text file is very close indeed in format to the type of markup that the Chicago guide recommends. At the interface level, XyWrite is as polished as any major word processor. Footnotes are hidden, underlining and bold show as such on the screen, etc, etc. It is also fast and programmable. Dominik ========================================================================= Date: 6 February 1988, 23:17:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: Preparing electronic mss. (51 lines) ---------------------------- From Allen H. Renear Tom, you should not let your publisher bully you into text processing practices with which you are uncomfortable or which do not support you as an author. Many of us have argued in many places for the AAP/SGML style tags presented the Chicago Guide -- but the last thing such tags should be is a burden on the author. Descriptive markup is a fundamentally correct approach to text processing: it should simplify and enhance *all* aspects of scholarly writing and publishing. First, talk to your publisher about exactly how they plan to process your tagged manuscript. It may turn out that they only want to get a plain ascii file with as much descriptive markup as possible. In that case you should be able to use Script GML. This will allow you to get nicely formatted copy for proofing and good support from your computer center. I suspect this is the situation. I always demand descriptive markup for typesetting projects -- but it makes less difference to me whether the tags are GML, Scribe, troff -ms, TEX, AAP or homegrown, as long as they describe the editorial objects of the document rather than specify formatting procedures. But if your publisher says that they really must have the tags described in the Chicago Guide you still have several options available. For instance, you can define Script macros that parallel the Chicago Guide tags, have each one end in a ">", and then use Script's ".dc" command to change the control word indicator to "<". Presto, your source file will have Chicago's AAP/SGML style tags and yet can be formatted by the Script formatter. You should have your Computer Center help you with this; it's their job. (I'm assuming your Script is Waterloo Script). In any case you will be using a general editor (Xedit) to prepare the files. This leaves something to be desired of course, but that's where we are today. For the direction in which text processing should be moving look at Softquad's Author/Editor. This is an AAP/SGML based editor for the Mac. I thought this much of my reply to Tom would be of general interest to the list. Anyone who wants further details should contact me directly. Allen Renear Computing and Information Services Brown University Bitnet: ALLEN@BROWNVM ========================================================================= Date: 7 February 1988, 14:41:41 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Use of CD-ROMs Beryl Atkins has asked, "how many of them actually use CD ROMs in their daily work & research? [Collins] are hesitating about CD ROM publication of concordances because they don't believe enough people use CD ROMs. And they say, rightly, that one CD ROM drive in the University library isn't going to make people in departments buy their own research material." From our point of view as researchers, I suspect that we almost unanimously want Collins and others to produce the CD-ROMs despite the fact that very few now use the technology "daily", so that we can make up our minds whether or not to buy the readers and disks. After all, our private and departmental funds are very limited, and few of us will put out the cash unless we can be sure that we'll make significant use of this technology. Because they earn their living at some peril, however, the publishers want us to clamour for CD-ROM publishing so that they can minimize their risks. So, how can we answer Beryl's question? I suggest that we say (1) what CD-ROMs we would buy if we already had readers, and (2) what minimum selection of CD-ROMs would drive us to buy a reader. This is my list: (1) desirable CD-ROMs (a) the CCAT/PHI disk (soon available; see OFFLINE 17) (b) the New OED (when available & depending on software provided) (c) the TLG (if I didn't already have access to an Ibycus & the TLG in my office) (d) the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (from the PHI), when it becomes available (e) a disk of 16th & esp. 17th cent. English lit. (2) minimum selection (a) & (e), or better (a), (d) & (e) None of the above, I'd guess, are likely to be published by Collins, so this reply may not encourage them. I have great difficulty, however, imagining what I would use on CD-ROM that I don't use regularly in any form because it's not available electronically. Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 7 February 1988, 19:16:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Preparing electronic mss. ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) While we are on this subject, I have just been given _Goedel, Escher and Bach_ which was apparently produced by the author himself using a text processor called TV-Edit. Anyone heard of it? Dominik ========================================================================= Date: 7 February 1988, 19:21:47 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs (41 lines) ---------------------------- From Norman Zacour [The following was sent to me as a private message; I'm submitting it to HUMANIST with the author's blessing and with a few very minor changes. -- W.M.] For what it is worth, I do not use, I have not used in the past, nor shall I ever use in the future, CD-ROMs. When libraries have the machinery installed, why bother duplicating everything at home? I am assuming that the great advantage to the scholar is the rapidity of access of large reference works - dictionaries, concordances, and the like. Have you counted recently the number of such references you consult in a year? How about 15 for a good guess? Is the expenditure worth it? I have at my fingertips dozens of language dictionaries, bibles, bible concordances, and medieval reference works in canon law etc etc that won't get CD-ROMMED in my lifetime. But the real point is that I won't get around to consulting most of them in my lifetime either. Beyond about a dozen helps that I lean on extensively (all of which I have in my office) I consult other such works only very occasionally. [Do you know about] the Domesday project, an extensive project undertaken by the BBC a couple of years ago, now on CD-ROMs? It [is] quite breathtaking, and as an aid to teaching school-children about England through the medium of pictures and graphs it's unbeatable. As an aid to scholarship, it's a bust. Nevertheless, it is possible that many people will buy CD-ROM machines for their home for uses other than scholarship (my colleague John Benton, of Cal Tech, for example - they are wonderful for movies) who would then use them as aids to scholarship also. How extensive that kind of market would be is anybody's guess. ========================================================================= Date: 7 February 1988, 19:30:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM use (22 lines) ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen The Humanities Computing Facility is currently in the process of purchasing two CD-ROM players in order to experiment with the technology and access material that comes online in future. The biggest problem I see is getting university administrations to catch up to the technology. Budget requests etc. take time. The ASU library has a dozen laser disc installations running iwth PCs devoted to a couple of information services. These are not 4.5 inch disks, but that is only because the services they subsrcibe to have not converted to CD format. From personal experience, it is almost impossible to get on these systems during weekdays ... they are very popular. Mark ========================================================================= Date: 7 February 1988, 19:35:26 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Who uses CD-ROMs? ---------------------------- From Sterling Bjorndahl I do. The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity has two Ibycus micros with the TLG texts - and we will get the PHI and CCAT CD's too. I would say there are a half dozen of us who use the CD regularly, with a few more occasional users. Sterling ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 08:58:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM use (28 lines) ---------------------------- From Randall Smith <6500rms@UCSBUXB.BITNET> This is a reply to David Nash's question of behalf of Beryl T. Atkins concerning CD-ROM use. The Classics Department at University of California at Santa Barbara has its own CD-ROM system, and we use it regularly to do text searches on TLG materials. We also plan to obtain Latin texts on CD as soon as they are available, and since we have the equipment, we would be interested in other items, such as journals, book collections, etc., which might become available on CD's, as long as the price is reasonable. Also, several members of the Classics Department have purchased computers with an eye to purchasing CD units as soon as the necessary CD's containing Greek and Latin text are available for home use. As far as we are concerned, there is plenty of interest in CD's, as long as the price is kept reasonable. Randall M. Smith ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 16:00:17 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM query (63 lines) ---------------------------- From (M.J. CONNOLLY [Slavic/Eastern]) I speak only from the Macintosh world, where the release of two important products (9 March?) will rapidly change the CD-ROM scene and the size of the prospective audience: CD-ROM drives and driver software, and the new version of HyperCard (to handle CD-ROM files currently inaccessible to version 1.0.1). One reasonably expects the Microsoft Bookshelf to run in the Macintosh environment then (announcement perhaps also to come in early March) and also the OED. Some large corporations, of course, have not waited, and these produce their own drivers and discs for internal use. Databases like 4th Dimension should have no difficulty with CD-ROM, once the appropriate driver is in the System folder. I see a market that will take off very soon. We have been tinkering with CD-ROM for our new Instructional Development Lab, but await the 'official' releases and know that there are a number of vendors out there ready to pull the wraps off once the Apple( (617)552-3912 cnnmj@bcvax3.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 19:15:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: OS/2 (35 lines) ---------------------------- From Dan Church Given the fact that most of us don't seem to have regular access to mainframes or advanced workstations, most of the discussion of OS/2 and multi-tasking along the lines of "I can already do that on my... [Fill in the blank with the name of your favorite mini or mainframe.]" appears to me to be beside the major point. Even granted that a Macintosh with enough memory and MULTIFINDER can already do most of what we would like to be able to do with OS/2, most of us who use PC's or clones can't afford to junk them and run out to buy an SE. So what about us? I suggest that we start by reading the editorial in the latest (January/February 1988) issue of _Turbo Technix_, the new technical magazine put out by Borland and sent free to anyone who has purchased a Borland product. The editorial by Jeff Duntemann entitled "DOS, The Understood" argues that DOS will outlast OS/2 because a) it can be made to fake most of OS/2's features seamlessly, b) OS/2 was designed primarily for the 80286, a "dead-end processor", c) a 386 machine with DOS and programs such as WINDOWS/386 or PC MOS-386 is already everything OS/2 claims to be, and d) we will never be able to do as much with OS/2 as with DOS because it is designed around a kernel that is a black box highly resistant to probing by hackers. This editorial strikes me as one of the most sensible discussions of the supposed advantages of OS/2 I've read so far. I would have quoted the whole thing for you if it hadn't appeared on the same page as the warning that no part of the magazine may be reproduced without permission. But I'd be willing to bet that you could get a reprint of it by writing to Borland Communications, 4585 Scotts Valley Drive, Scotts Valley, CA 95066, U.S.A. ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:07:06 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: documenting texts (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Lou Burnard 1. Mark Olsen rightly complains that the texts he received from the Text Archive were inadequately documented. Alas, he does not say whether or not he intends, having (presumably) gone to the trouble of identifying what all those mysterious tags actually represent, to pass the information back to us... 2. Such information should (in theory) be available from the depositor of the text. In this connexion, may I ask what the general feeling is about publishing names and address of depositors? We have this information, necessarily, for all A and X category texts, but it is not in the catalogue so as to save space. Should it be? Should we also indicate a (possibly many years out of date) contact address for all U category texts? How do actual or potential depositors feel about this? How do actual or potential punters feel? 3. I have just finished a document (about 10 pages) which describes in some detail the various english language dictionaries available from the text archive. Please send a note to archive@uk.ac.oxford.vax if you would like a copy. Lou Burnard Oxford Text Archive P.S. Sorry Rosanne, we're fresh out of Tennessee Williams. Would Tom Stoppard do? ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:09:41 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Dan Brink's tour (18 lines) ---------------------------- From Dan Brink I am planning an eastern tour to check out computer conferencing systems in early April. NJI, Guelph, UMich are on the tour so far, and maybe NYIT. Any suggestions of other good places to try to visit would be appreicated. *****P L E A S E R E S P O N D T O Dan Brink ATDXB@ASUACAD *****& N O T T O H U M A N I S T ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:16:44 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Producing GML markup with Xedit (34 lines) ---------------------------- From Michael Sperberg-McQueen In addition to the good suggestions of Allen Renear, it should also be mentioned that Waterloo GML can also be modified in the two ways salient for Tom Benson's problem: the tags defined by the U of C style can be defined, as GML tags, and added to the set of GML tags provided by Waterloo, and (if the publisher thinks it important, or the author finds it makes the file easier to read) '<' and '>' can be used as tag delimiters instead of ':' and '.'. The advantages of adding new GML tags instead of new Script macros are that you can use existing Waterloo tags and their underlying macros where appropriate, and you can use GML tags in the middle of a line instead of only in column 1, which makes it easier to have a clean, readable input file. The consultants on your CMS system ought, as Allen Renear suggests, to help you with the adaptations. They may, however, need to be told to look at the .GT and .GA control words in the reference manual to see how to define new GML tags and map them either to existing Script macros or to ones you and they define, and to change the GML delimiters with ".DC GML <;.DC MCS >" -- even good Script consultants may not know these ins and outs of GML. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:22:25 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMS & Players (30 lines) ---------------------------- From Dr Abigail Ann Young Subject: CD-ROMS & Players My attitude to this is similar, I think, to what Norman Zacour said earlier. I tend to look on the CD's themselves and the equipment necessary to use them as something a library, rather than an individual, would acquire. I use the Thesuarus Linguae Latinae, and DuCange's Lexicon of Mediaeval Latin, but I don't own them: the Library has them readily available, and if occasionally I have to wait for a few minutes because someone else is using a volume I want to consult, well, it's just not that great a hardship! I also consult the PG and PL of Migne, and the more modern critical editions of ancient and mediaeval church fathers and teachers in the library, except for a few volume(s) of authors I regularly work with. I can no more imagine buying a CD-ROM of the TLL for myself than I can imagine buying the printed TLL for myself, but I think that that sort of thing ought to be available in the University Library System on CD-ROM as well as in print: it seems to be the librarians' dream medium, no matter how many people use it, the "book" can't be hurt! ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:25:23 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Using CD-ROM for textual research (43 lines) ---------------------------- From Robin C. Cover In response to the inquiry of David Nash on the use and popularity of CD-ROM's, I would suggest (at least) that he find out how many IBYCUS micro-computers there are in use. Even if used institutionally, they constitute available drives that could be used with other CD-ROM disks. Secondly, I would add that our institution has done some market research concerning the potential popularity of CD-ROM drives *provided that* tantilizing software and databases were available. It was determined that CD-ROM is a viable market (we can get OEM prices for close to $400, and the prices will probably drop). So, we are planning a hypertext CD-ROM product for biblical studies, the first version of which is due (maybe) late this year. In response to Norman Zacour, who says he will never buy a personal CD-ROM unit, and could not really conceive of its use: would you be seduced if we could provide you with original biblical texts linked by hot-key to the major lexica, grammars (etc) together with programs to do interactive concording on the texts, and searching (grep/Boolean) of these texts to boot? Finally, the only dark cloud I see with respect to CD-ROM is the advent of read/write optical-magnetic disk, which already is available. It has 30 millisecond disk access time, which is a considerable improvement over the 500 millisecond time of CD-ROM, and hinders performance. If these drives drop to within the $1000 range during the next year or so, I think many of us would want to support this medium rather than CD-ROM; the removable (90 megabyte, 650 megabyte) disks would be optimal for our other storage problems as well. Professor Robin C. Cover ZRCC1001@SMUVM1.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:27:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text encoding initiative (16 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz Nancy Ide's throwaway remark "even an extension of SGML" fills me with horror. Isnt SGMl complicated enough for you text-encoding people? Why create something non-standard for humanists, why not go with the crowd NOW. I say good luck to the dictionary chap that wanted to use SGML. Much as I hate S*, its not that bad ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:29:17 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM and videodisk (26 lines) ---------------------------- From Randall Jones Norman Zacour's recent note about the Doomsday Project has prompted me to offer a clarification concerning a misconception that apparently exists among some of us. The Doomsday project is N O T on CD-ROM, rather is is on videodisc, a medium that is similar to CD-ROM only in that it is optical storage that uses laser technology. Videodisc stores analog video images and can also store digital information, but for most applications the video material what is important. There are digital motion video programs now available, but they are still quite experimental and very expensive. Randall Jones Humanities Research Center 3060 JKHB Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602 ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:42:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Sun also rises on HUMANIST (22 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz David Graham feels that Sun users are looking down on him, and urges us not to start a hardware war on HUMANIST. Yes, I agree! But its not "evangelizing" to say that multiple tasks in multiple *visible* windows is an excellent working environment. I don't think our Sun is an expensive luxury, any more that an Ibycus would be if we could afford it ..... Why don;t you declare the correspondence on multi-tasking over, Willard? Sebastian Rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:43:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: PhD exams in computing ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I would have thought that the idea of a "computer methodology" was a non-starter; after all, the virtue of the computer is that it is a *general purpose* tool. Could the exam subject not be "a quantitative approach to New Testament studies", making it comparable to "structuralist", "Marxist" etc approaches? If quantification is the issue addressed by these NT 'n' computing courses referred to. We are about to start an MSc course in Archaeological Computing here; the punters will do the programming/database/graphics sorts of things you might expect. I also have a friend whose PhD revolves around a statistical approach to Roman pottery. I'd hate to defend her doing a PhD on "programming in archaeology" though. Sebastian Rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:45:07 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Relational database software in the public domain ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I sympathise with the request for a PD database, but, really, you cannot expect to get EVERYTHING for free! People will recommend PC-FILE (supposed to be good stuff) for a PC, but wouldn't it be worth spending a few 100 [pounds,dollars] on a commercial product with support and a manual, if its going to be used a lot? Creating SGML-conformant output shouldn't be hard from any reputable database. But if you are on a mainframe, what about Famulus77? Its not PD, but its cheap; its not relational but it would do what you asked for? Lou Burnard will tell you all about it on request, I am sure. As an example of a commercial product, PC-Ingres cost us 250 pounds for a site license. OK, so it may not be appropriate, but for that kind of money for the whole site, going outside PD isn't impossible. (That was an academic price, mind you!) Sebastian Rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:46:44 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Texts? ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen I have a request for the Consolatione de philosophiae by Boethius. The user would be particularly interested in the Loeb edition, (1952?). Any information on this would be greatly appreciated. If we can not find it, we might have to scan it. Thanks Mark ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:49:40 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML, markup, and texts (106 lines) ---------------------------- From Stephen DeRose Well, I've been watching HUMANIST with interest for some time, and I guess it's time to dive in. First, on the issue of data format and headers: SGML provides the features I have so far seen requested on HUMANIST. An SGML file is pure ASCII, and contains text, tags, and entities. Tags are mnemonic names for parts of the text, marked off by angle brackets (e.g., "

"for paragaph). Entities name things that can't otherwise be coded in straight ASCII (perhaps "ℵ"). That's all there need be to SGML, unless you want to get fancy. A "prolog" in a well-defined format defines the document's particular tag-set, entities, and any non-default syntax. Because it is all printable characters, you don't lose data going through mailers, dealing with IBM mainframes, etc. Because the tags are descriptive rather than procedural, you need not encode the specifics of your word-processor, printer, current style sheet, display characteristics, etc. etc. A block quote is still a block quote regardless of any of these factors. Also, because the tags are mnemonic and pure ASCII, even with *no* word-processor a human can read an SGML file. The objections I hear to SGML are usually: 1) "It doesn't have the tags I need." This shows a widespread misunderstanding of SGML. SGML is not a tag-set at all, but a way of *specifying* tag-sets, entity-names, and their syntax. A well-known tag-set called "AAP" (for it is from the American Association of Publishers) is *one* instance of an SGML-conforming tag-set; but saying it "is" SGML is like saying that a particular user program "is" Pascal. 2) "It takes up too much space." But just about any mnemonic for (say) paragraph is sure to be shorter than 2 RETURNs and 5 spaces, or procedural commands to skip line and change the indentation level, etc., etc. One can also define abbreviations (say, for "ℵ"), gaining the brevity of transliteration without losing the other advantages, all within the easy part of the SGML standard. So, for example, if one is doing a lot of Hebrew, one defines a "" tag, within the scope of which a defined transliteration scheme is used. 3) "Typing pointy brackets and mnemonics is a pain." SGML says nothing whatsoever about what you have to type. Any word-processor with "style sheets" at least allows SGML-like mnemonic descriptors -- and how you specify them is as varied as the programs themselves. Also, it seems obvious that even *typing* a mnemonic is less pain than the usual task of translating the mnemonic into a long series of formatting codes which are specific to some particular word processor. 4) "Slashes (or whatever) are better than pointy brackets." This is of course insignificant. One can change the default, but in any case the choice of tag punctuation is a trivial matter. Globally changing "

" to ":p." is a problem of a very different magnitude from locating all paragraphs given only a file with miscellaneous carriage returns and spaces, some of which sometimes happen to mark paragraphs. It's the difference between artificial intelligence and a text-editor "change" command. 5) "SGML isn't WYSYWYG". This is simply false; just as with typing, the display can be anything. MS Word using style sheets (which is a very poor but real example of a descriptive tagging system) is no less "WYSIWYG" than MS Word using (shudder!) rote formatting all the time. Of course, the true, ultimate "WYSIWYG" word-processor is the pencil. 6) "SGML isn't efficient enough for purpose X." Usually, X is some specialized kind of information retrieval. One must consider Fisher's Fundamental Theorom from Genetics: "the better adapted a system is to a particular environment, the less adaptable it is to new environments." To draw an analogy from my own domain, one can always design a specialized grammatical theory for a single language, which is more effective for that language than any of the general theories. But linguists are trained to avoid this, because such analysis usually contributes nothing to the work of students of other languages. It is true also in Computer Science: if one optimizes a program for one machine/language/ task, it will be vastly more difficult to adapt it for a new of extended one. An SGML file can be trivially converted to other forms for special purposes. Consider that the SGML version of the entire OED can be searched in a small number of seconds. On another topic, it's interesting to watch the multi-tasking debate. There is so much about OS-2 and Windows. Discussions with Microsoft indicate it has little consciousness of the problems of writing systems. Even accents are not handled adequately. Someone called the Mac "silly" -- that's fine for him, but since I can do almost everything I want (and almost everything I have heard Humanists and HUMANIST's express desire for) in a multitude of languages, off- the-shelf, with *any* monitor and *any* video card, with standard commercial software on the Mac, in an interface style that IBM is working hard to copy, I'm willing to use a "silly" machine. Steven J. DeRose Brown University and the Summer Institute of Linguistics D106GFS at UTARLVM1.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 8 February 1988, 20:53:21 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD Rom caveat ---------------------------- From Sterling Bjorndahl M.J. Connolly's enthusiastic response about cd/rom, cd/i, etc., reminded me of a caveat. I raised this on humanist some time ago already and aroused zero response. Warning: readable/writeable optical media are being developed. Some of these use laser-magnetic technology; others use laser-phase change technology, and there are yet other technologies being investigated. My own feeling is that this will send the read-only media the way of the eight-track audio cartridge. ROM works fine for the short and medium term, and I'm very glad I have access to it, and I expect to see more of it now that it is a practical and functioning technology. However, if I were a major commercial publisher I would think twice about investing my own money *heavily* in the read only technologies. If the hardware developers can get the read/write heads to move fast enough (for I read that this is a major design problem at this point), we may all have 500MB drives hooked up to our micros as a matter of course, and these may be as easy to use as modern floppies (if I understand the technology correctly). At that point we won't need or want the ROM devices, unless perhaps we are running a text archive. Sterling Bjorndahl BJORNDAS@CLARGRAD.BITNET ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 00:03:55 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Seductive biblical hot keys for that 5% (27 lines) ---------------------------- From Norman Zacour To Robin Cover and his seductive biblical hot keys I can only respond with Luke 4:5-8. With a CD Rom he should have no trouble finding it. Seriously, however, the technology available for rapid and thorough consultation of reference works is quite admirable, and will become more so; its role, however, is the role that the indices of scriptoria, archives, and libraries played in the past. They are really institutional in nature, useful - indeed essential - in their place. But since I spend about 95% of my working time reading, thinking, writing and swearing, and only 5% (if indeed that) looking things up, I cannot get excited about moving a proxy library into my apartment. I think that what I'm talking about is a sense of proportion. I also have a sneaking suspicion, somewhat confirmed by Cover's last paragraph, that the latest obsession can quickly become the latest obsolescence, unavoidable in this day and age, perhaps, but preferably to be borne at the institutional level. ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 00:09:24 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML/AAP tag text processing today (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Allen H. Renear Michael Sperberg-McQueen's approach to defining SGML/AAP tags in Script GML is the correct one of course. Within seconds of posting my note I realized what an embarassing kludge I was about to exhibit to the world and fired off notes to McCarty (to excise the offending bits) and Benson (to keep him on the right path). But, alas, CORNELLC went down and my northward mail queued up &c. &c. Anyway, both Script and GML allow the delimiters -- both beginning and ending -- to be reassigned; and tailoring the GML delimiters, as Michael noted, makes the most sense. *If* you feel you really must change delimiters at all. As Sperberg-McQueen hints delimiters are trivial; stick with the sensible ":" and "." of GML and just define AAP GML tags. If your publisher says they *have* to be "<>"s you can change them at the end. There are some general morals here though. One of them is that SGML/AAP style text processing is indeed possible today, apart from any special SGML software. And it can be supported by powerful formatters and programmable editors. Another is that using SGML/AAP style tags is easy, in fact, nothing could be easier. Of course we do want software that will support our tag based text processing more actively than general editors and formatters do. And that's coming. Consider, again, Softquad's Author/Editor -- it creates an SGML/AAP file, but as you simply choose document components from a context sensitive menu (it shows you only the relevant components for that point in the document) not only do you not bother with delimiters, you don't even bother with tags per se -- that's all handled by the editor. This is the sort of stuff we can hope to see more of. ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 00:20:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Zacour's sense of proportion (33 lines) Norman Zacour has responded with a certain lack of enthusiasm to the various comments about CD-ROMs and what they offer. I also spend a great deal of time thinking, swearing, etc., and less time looking things up, but I think my percentages are not quite his. Having spent the last 3 years or so tinkering with database software and learning to depend on it for gathering, arranging, and retrieving the textual evidence I use, I am less resistant to the vision (from "an high mountain" to be sure, but I smell no sulphur) of wonderfully vast amounts of source material. At the fingertips, in one's own study, this material will tend to be used much more than if it's only in the Library. Perhaps that's good, perhaps not; anyway, for the kind of work I do, the easier the sources are to get to, the better. Zacour has a more basic point with which I have no trouble whatsoever. Forgive me, but I sometimes, in some contexts, wonder what happened to the "humanities" in "humanities computing." I am reminded of our ancient colleague Archimedes, who is supposed to have said that if he were given a place to stand and a lever long enough, he would be able to move the world. I suppose that he would have, too. Where would we be now? Spinning beyond the orbit of Pluto? Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 09:42:19 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: From: goer@sophist.uchicago.edu(Richard Goerwitz) From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMS and what not (64 lines) In response to Robin Cover's posting, asking whether we would be tempted to buy a CD-ROM given advanced hypertext systems, let me point out that these systems are still vaporware! And when they do come out, most will not even be able to act like a simple concordance, allowing you to look up things by root (or some generalized dictionary entry). Most will not even allow a sophisticated pattern-matching set (say regular expressions). I guess I should let everyone in on the fact that we have been corresponding privately about this, and that the system you are working on actually has these capabilities in the works. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors. When I begin to see electronic products that can offer me keyword searches, regular expressions, and textual variants, I most certainly will purchase them! Until then, I'll have to keep the hardcopy at hand constantly anyway (hard to use the LXX, BHK, etc. with no textual apparatus), so the expense is hard for me to justify, given my graduate student's budget! Let me point out that, even if such systems do not rival their hardcopy coun- terparts in comprehensiveness, those who can afford them will probably find them useful for browsing, or for quick location of scattered references in various texts. One thing that is troublesome about hardcopy is that it takes oodles of time to flip through several texts at once, trying to locate little things here and there, all the while staying parallel in each work (this is often the case in biblical work, where one has the original, and several of the versions lying out on one's desk at once, not to mention reference works and commentaries). I believe that some will find the computer something of a time-saver in cases like this. In all, though, I must agree with Norman Zacour, who notes that most of one's time is spent flipping through mental pages - not actual books. I might also point out that at this point in my life - word processing excepted - computers have probably cost me more time than they've saved. I've spent a lot of time learning MS-DOS, UNIX, and some programming languages. I've also spent a long time developing a few programs that really aren't terribly sophis- ticated by commercial standards (the economic realities here dictate that I do other things than program all day). Worst of all, I've spent countless hours learning individual programs, from the tiniest utility to the biggest applica- tions programs - all of which are constantly growing, mutating, maturing, and dying. It is an incredible time investment, and so far it has cost me far more than it's paid off. For me to take the plunge for new software right now, it's going to have to be pretty slick, pretty easy to use, pretty reliable, and su- premely useful, not to mention stable in its interface, and permanent in its availability! The kinds of projects you are working on have as good a chance of fitting this bill as any other I've heard of. Again, good luck. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 11:17:20 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM use (32 lines) ---------------------------- From Keith W. Whitelam () We are in the process of ordering a CD-ROM reader so that the technology can be assessed. The hope is to equip a micro lab with readers for use by Arts departments in text analysis. Departmental funds are scarce, particularly in the Arts, so Computing Science are going to provide the hardware and help in the assessment. Incidentally does anyone know if it is possible to network a CD-ROM reader so that the texts can be accessed by more than one micro or are we faced with the problem of providing readers for all the machines? The hypertext CD-ROM for biblical studies, mentioned by Robin Cover, is precisely the kind of development that we are looking for. As a biblical specialist, such a development offers immense possibilities for research. The great advantage of CD-ROMS is surely not simply to look up a few passages but to provide a large text database for searches and so analysis of a particular text or texts. The caveat introduced by Sterling Bjorndahl concerning a breakthrough in read/write optical disks is a major problem. With limited resources, do we await the breakthrough, in technology and more importantly pricing, or do we provide a research and teaching facility based on CD-ROMS? As a footnote, do IBYCUS market their micro in Britain? ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 11:45:12 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Are CDROMs all that marvellous? (43 lines) ---------------------------- From Susan Hockey Before we get too excited about the prospect of CDROMs all over the place, shouldn't we be asking what we can do with them, or (to put it the right way round) can they answer the questions which we want to ask? There are two approaches to CDROMs for text: (1) The TLG and the planned PHI CDROMs which are intended for use with Ibycus. These contain only sequential text files - the apparent speed of searching on Ibycus is because of a hardware chip between the disk and the CPU which acts as a filter and only passes to the CPU hit records. Any other software which reads this disk on a PC is bound to be much slower, probably too slow for anybody to want to use interactively on anything but a short text. (2) Everybody else's which use indexes for searching, and are supplied to the user with packaged software for their use. For these it is in the supplier's interest not to let the user reproduce the basic text. To speed up access times these systems often hold the indexes on more conventional disk. Most CDROMs which are available now in this category contain bibliographic data, but there are plans for others holding text. Therefore it seems to me that (1) can only answer questions which are defined as a sequential search (I admit it does this very well) and (2) can only answer questions which somebody else (i.e. the compiler of the indexes) has decided need to be answered. Neither (1) nor (2) address the problem of retrieving too much information (for human digestion) other than at the level of collocations, nor do they provide the user with much opportunity to do any further analysis with the text using other software. Apart from one or two attempts to index the TLG material I don't know of any CDROMs for textual scholarly use apart from the ones intended for Ibycus. (I don't count the OED CDROM here.) I would like to know what use HUMANISTS want to make of CDROMs. I don't want to hear how marvellous it is have all this text available. I want to hear what specific questions can be answered now and what scholarly activities can be aided by CDROMs. I also want to hear what questions people would like to ask which can't be answered now and whether they think existing CDROM systems could answer them. Susan Hockey SUSAN@VAX.OX.AC.UK ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 16:09:45 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Teleconferencing at Rochester Institute of Technology (204 ll.) ---------------------------- From Doug Hawthorne REPLY TO 02/09/88 08:31 FROM UNKNOWN: In a remarkable coincidence I received the following, fairly lengthy description of the use of teleconferencing in a history course at Rochester Institute of Technology just before reading Dan Brink's query. Other readers of HUMANIST may find in the RIT experience some ideas applicable to their own teaching. Doug Hawthorne From the Handicap Digest # 235: Written by: patth@dasys1 (Patt Haring) Modern American History on VAX Notes Computer Conferencing in RIT Classes by Professor Norman Coombs Professor of history Rochester Institute of Technology 1 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester N. Y. 14607 Bitnet address: bitnet%"nrcgsh@ritvaxd" At Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), a truly modern version of Modern American history is being taught with VAX Notes, Digital's new electronic conferencing package. This class is part of an on-going experiment using a computer conference to replace the standard classroom lecture/discussion format. Results have been extremely positive to date. Using VAX Notes, professors and students have the opportunity to transcend the boundaries of time and space. Since no one has to be at the same place at the same time to participate in the conference, VAX Notes provides a maximum of schedule flexibility for everyone concerned. This approach is particularly useful for off-campus students trying to balance busy schedules that include work, family and school. VAX Notes is also a convenient and easy conference program to use even for professors and students who have very limited computer experience. VAX Notes is a software package that is compatible with the VMS software environment and works with standard editors, such as EDT, EVE and WPS. It can be called from the ALL-IN-1 Office and Information System menu and is available on all Digital VAX systems, from MicroVAX to high-end VAX computers. A VAX Notes conference is overseen by a moderator, (in this case, the class professor), who posts of a variety of topics within a particular conference. At RIT the data is entered on the professor's (Apple ii plus and modem). Students can enter their responses on a variety of terminals, personal workstations and pc's located in labs in class buildings, dorms or, in the case of a pc, at home) and the response to each topic is automatically attached to that subject. This allows several discussions to be held simultaneously within a conference. Everyone is assigned a title and a number, allowing the user to follow each in a logical and normal fashion. VAX Notes keeps a notebook in the user's main directory that tracks which topics and responses a user has read. Each time the user participates in the conference, VAX Notes automatically begins at the first item which had been added since the user last took part. This allows the participant to keep up with the discussion without having to remember which notes had already been viewed and without having to find find his or her place. The Modern American History course was structured so students gained information from textbook readings and from watching video tapes. These were available in the library where students could use them at their own convenience. The VAX Notes conference took the place of a classroom discussion on these materials. Each week I posted a set of three to five topics on the current material, consisting of several questions. Students logged on to VAX Notes and attached their responses electronically to the relevant topic by inputting them on terminals located either on campus or from home I checked the postings for new entries several times each day and added comments of MY own when appropriate. There were two sections of Modern American History given in the Summer and Fall semesters. The material in each was identical and both sections took the same objective exams. The traditional class met twice weekly for discussions with the professor and served as a control group for the experiment. Both in the Summer and Fall, the students in the computer confeencing section scored a higher mean grade than those in the traditional class. In the Fall, the control group scored a mean grade of 78.7 while the computer students averaged 82.0. This probably does not mean that computer conferences are better than class discussion. Rather, the use of the computer frightened away the below average student. Also the computer section did have a grade point average slightly above that of the control class. Students and professors also used electronic mail (VAXmail) extensively. The professor and some students felt that there was more than the usual interaction between professor and student. It is unusual for a professor to single out a student in public and call him in for a discussion, but (VAXmail) made it easy to develop one-to-one conversations quite frequently. One student remarked that, as a result of being able to use this facility, this professor was the most helpful she had encountered at college. The questionnaire mentioned previously asked the students to rate professor helpfulness and availability compared to normal class settings. The computer students ranked that item 4.8 out of 5 and also scored electronic mail as the major factor in that process. Electronic mail has been of especial aid to me because I am blind. Students use electronic mail to submit written materials to me; this replaces the need for human readers. Finding the computer as a communication tool made it easy for me to envision its possibility in teaching. Because the project ran on a minimal budget, the personal PC, old fashioned Apple II PLUS AND eCHO II sPEECH SYNTHESIZER WHICH were used could not emulate a VT100 terminal. This did not interfere with the use of VAX Notes, but it has limited the use of some of the system's possibilities. Obviously upgrading the access equipment would open even more computing potentials. During the Winter quarter of 1986-87, Mr. Stanley Bissell used VAX Notes in a telecourse on micro computers. This will open new avenues of communication with distance learners. Plans are also underway to adapt the Modern American history course for a class of deaf students. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) is on the RIT campus. I plan to use captioned television, textbooks and the VAX Notes program on the computer to work directly with the NTID students. This will remove the need for interpreters, note takers and tutors and bring teacher and student closer together. Not only can computer conferencing bridge the gap between the teacher and distance learner, it can transcend the gulf of physical handicaps in the teaching process. RIT Sidebar Founded in 1829, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a privately endowed, co-educational university that enrolls about 14,000 full- and part-time students in its undergraduate and graduate programs. RIT's modern campus occupies 1,300 acres in suburban Rochester, N.Y. There are nine colleges at RIT. Its primary emphasis is oncareer education A pioneer in cooperative education, RIT offers programs that allow students to alternate academic course work with paid experience in business and industry. With a program that began in 1912, RIT has the fourth oldest and fourth largest cooperative education program in the nation. In addition tot traditional curriculum, RIT offers world renowned programs at the School for American Craftsmen and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. As part of RIT's emphasis on career education, the Institute believes that the availability of computing resources is critical to the education of students, the instructional and research efforts of faculty, and effective administration. Computing resources rely heavily on Digital Equipment Corp. equipment. Through its department of Information Systems and Computing (ISC), the Institute maintains relatively open access to computing facilities for all students, faculty and staff. All RIT students, regardless of major, must demonstrate computer literacy before graduation. ISC has a VAX cluster with a VAX 8650 computer and three VAX-11/785 systems running the VMS operating system. Among others, we use APL, COBOL, LISP, PASCAL, BASIC, DSM (MUMPS), PL/I, C, Fortran, MACRO ASSEMBLER, ALL-IN-1, VAX NOTES, C.A.S., DAL, DECgraph, GKS and ReGis. ISC also has a VAX-11/785 computer which runs ULTRIX. The College of Engineering has a VAX-11/782 system, and NTID has a VAX-11/750 computer. The Center for Imaging Science has a VAX 8200 comuterand a GPX II system, (a color Microvax graphics workstation). The Computer Science department has a VAX-11/780 computer running ULTRIX and two VAX-11/780 computers running Berkley 4.2 UNIX. The American Video Institute has a VAX-11/780 computer and several Pro IVIS videodisk systems. All of these systems and several others are linked via two Ethernet networks which are bridged together, an Infotron IS4000 data switch and most recently with an AT&T ISN data switch. ISC has about 300 Digital terminals, including GIGI, VT220, VT240 and VT241, located in five major users center distributed around campus. There are several hundred other terminals and microcomputers which access our system both on campus and off-campus. They include approximately 800 Rainbows personal workstations, 30 Pro 350 systems, 25 DECmate personal workstations, and IBM PC%, Macintosh%, Apple II% and others. Patt Haring UUCP: ..cmcl2!phri!dasys1!patth Big Electric Cat Compu$erve: 76566,2510 New York, NY, USA MCI Mail: Patt Haring; GEnie-PHaring (212) 879-9031 FidoNet Mail: 1:107/701 or 107/222 ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 16:11:45 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text Encoding Initiative (22 lines) ---------------------------- From Nancy Ide Sebastian, We certainly hope that the set of specific tags that we develop for use in encoding machine readable texts intended for literary and linguistic research do not *extend* SGML. I may have been inaccurate in what I said on HUMANIST, since we have every expectation that the tag sets we develop will, like the AAP tag set for electronic manuscript markup, be an *application* of SGML. But without beginning the actual research, we cannot yet be sure that SGML will serve all of our needs (althogh we expect it to--the argument about SGML's adequacy has already gone around once on HUMANIST). Nancy Ide ide@vassar ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 16:16:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TVedit and how-far-have-we-come (52 lines) ---------------------------- From Michael Sperberg-McQueen A recent inquiry on Humanist concerned the program TVedit, reportedly used by Douglas R. Hofstadter in writing and typesetting his book Goedel Escher Bach. I had never heard of this, but by chance ran into a reference to it yesterday. In their survey (1971) of early interactive editors, Andries van Dam and David E. Rice describe TVedit as "one of the earliest (1965) time-sharing, CRT-based text editors." It was developed at Stanford University, and appears from the description to be what we would now call a full-screen editor, more restricted in its command language but more sophisticated in its user interface than Stanford's later editor Wylbur (itself a very good program, the best line editor I've ever used), which did not acquire full-screen capacities until much later. No details are given but the program appears to have run under a time-sharing system called Thor, about which I know nothing. Reference: Andries van Dam and David E. Rice, "On-line Text Editing: A Survey," Computing Surveys: The Survey and Tutorial Journal of the ACM 3.3 (September 1971): 93-114. The article also contains a brief description of what must be the first implementation of hypertext on a machine (the "Hypertext Editing System" at Brown) and the earliest hierarchically structured editor I've encountered, used both for outline processing and as a syntax-directed editor for PL/I and other programming languages ("Emily," developed at Argonne National Labs by a Stanford grad student, and named for Emily Dickinson). The amateurs of history among us will be amused or intrigued to read of editors "supplied ... as part of a time-sharing system for those few lucky enough to have access to one." Can it be so recently that even mainframe time-sharing was so rare? And who among Bitnet users can remain unmoved by the authors' closing evocation of a day when, they hope, manuscripts will not need to be rekeyboarded every time authors jump from one system to another, when "files can be cooperatively worked on in real-time, regardless of geographic location or editing system, and still at reasonable costs." Let us pause for a moment of silence and all give thanks for the networks, which have given us facilities that only sixteen years ago were only a visionary dream. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 16:20:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Multitasking, Desqview, Windows (62 lines) ---------------------------- From Mike Stairs It is time for me to join the fray! Up to this time I have been quietly reading Humanist without actively participating. My office is next to Willard's so I figured he could respond for the CCH as a whole. Willard asked about Deskview and Windows etc. I just acquired both packages along with a mouse and 4 meg extended memory and 1 meg expanded memory. Both these packages make using PCs almost bearable (I am hoping to get a 386 machine very soon). Though some of my computing needs may differ from the average humanist I have some idea of what they probably need and also what they think they need. There seems to be a general fear of new technology and a desire to make do with what is presently available rather then venture into the *new wave*. This is a waste of computing power that is there for YOU if you dare! I came from the Computer Science department to this position but have a strong background in philosophy. I would argue that machines could never think but that they are tools for achieving that which was previously impossible or very time consuming. I don't want to start a discussion on the first claim but the second point is important. If Humanists are afraid of available tools they are losing their own very valuable time. Why do a concordance that takes 5 hours when with a faster machine it may take 1 hour? It seems a false economy indeed if cost is the motivating factor. Analysis that would not be undertaken with a slow machine could now be possible. I'm not advocating that everyone rush out and buy the fastest machine on the market today but people should try to not be so aprehensive of the changing technology. All this said, what are the present alternatives to DOS? Both DeskView and Windows are superior to DOS standing alone. They are not replacements to DOS but rather enhancements. They allow you to use a mouse, for this reason alone you should be convinced. The use of a mouse is a great time saver. But this is just a bonus, the true joy of these systems is their multitasking ability. Anyone who has used TeX will will be happy that they can have their favorite word processor, previewer and TeX all running at the same time. You can use the spooler and work on something else too. You could be even downloading a huge document with your modem at the same time. It is like having a room full of computers all accessing the same files, but capable of doing completely different tasks at the same time. You could even view multiple tasks on the same screen. OS/2 will not be able to do this with DOS tasks so there is no point in using it. You are not forced to buy (expensive) expanded memory to use DeskView. It can swap programs on and off your hard disks as they become activated. It is like a large ramdisk (though it is a bit slower). I realize that I have rambled on a bit too much. The point is that it is frustrating to see people afraid of new technology which could save them a lot of time and work in the long run. I guess the question is whether it is worth the effort to keep up. If the answer is "no" there will be many important answers that Humanists are searching for that will never be found. I know my time is too valuable to waste it when there are alternatives to the present methodologies. Mike Stairs Site Coordinator Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 20:08:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM / SGML (36 lines) ---------------------------- From David Nash Last night here I attended a talk by Bill Gates (founder etc. of the MicroSoft corporation) at the monthly meeting of the Macintosh group of the BCS (Boston Computer Society). Followers of recent threads on this group may be interested to note that the up-beat note on which he ended his hour was an assured expression of confidence that SGML-based documents on CD-ROM are about to appear in great numbers. He cited examples outside academia, such as large manuals, parts catalogues, and didn't even mention MicroSoft Bookshelf (the CD-ROM now available with a dictionary, Zip Code directory, almanac, etc.) He noted that the people at Boeing regard the paper copies of the full manuals for their large aircraft as rare immoveable objects (which are consulted in some kind of rack, as I read his gesture). He said that US Government publications are now prepared in SGML, and predicted (?) that in a few years the machine-readable versions of (most?) US Government documents would be more readily available than printed versions. I noted that he didn't explain "CD-ROM", but felt he had to expand on what "SGML" is. If you believe what he was saying, it sounds CD-ROM readers will soon be around as much as, say, microfiche readers. -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 9 February 1988, 20:09:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Early editors (40 lines) ---------------------------- From David Durand If we're going to talk about the history of editing and advanced text- handling on computers I have to put in a plug for Douglas Engelbart's amazing work. He implemented the first integrated office with central file handling, outlining, text-handling + arbitrary cross referencing in the early 60's. I'm not sure when the first version cam online, but I think it was before 1965. A few articles: still very worthwhile reading, as the fundamental issues have not changed since then, though the technology certainly has: ::BOOKLONG: ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C. ATL:A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect MTL:Vistas in Information Handling, Volume 1 AMR:editors MOA:Howerton, P. D., and Weeks, D. C. LOC:1-29 PLP:Washington, D.C. PUB:Spartan Books DAT:1963 ::CONFPROC: ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C., and English, W. K. ATL:A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect MTL:AFIPS Proceedings, Fall Joint Computer Conference DAT:Fall 1968 There are a number of later ones not included here. Citations taken from Paul Kahn's distribution of the IRIS Hypermedia Bibliography which was started by Steven Drucker and is now maintained by Nicole Yankelovitch. ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 09:12:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Nuancing Susan Hockey on CD-ROMs (89 lines) ---------------------------- From Bob Kraft There is much to say about the current CD-ROM discussion, but for the moment I would like to nuance some of the information in Susan Hockey's recent contribution, to help avoid possible misunderstanding on a couple of details: (1) Currently three different TLG CD-ROMs have been produced, dubbed "A", "B", and "C". The TLG "A" disk was issued in the summer/fall of 1985 in a provisional, pioneering (pre High Sierra) format that simultaneously was made available on the new IBYCUS Scholarly Computer. Subsequently, CCAT (with Packard Foundation funding) developed experimental prototype programs to access the "A" disk from IBM type machines. The TLG "B" disk appeared soon after, prepared as a version of the "A" materials (or at least of the Greek texts on the "A" disk, which also had some Latin and other texts) with lexical indices by Brown University (Paul Kahn) in cooperation with Harvard (Gregory Crane). This disk does not run on IBYCUS, and ran very fast on the machines for which it was intended (initially an IBM RT, I think). The software was adapted for an IBM PC environment by Randall Smith, and, I think, for an Apple Macintosh environment as well, although I am sketchy on the exact details. Gregory Crane now uses it on a Mac, if I am not mistaken. The TLG CD-ROM "B" uses a format developed at MIT, also pre-High Sierra. TLG CD-ROM "C" has been mastered and is about to be released. It uses the (provisional) High Sierra format and can, at a very rudimentary level, be accessed by any machine equipped to read that format; CCAT is developing software to use the "C" disk from IBM type machines (employing the recently released DOS Extension), and IBYCUS has redesigned its access program to read the "C" disk. Complications are caused by the internal ID-locator formatting of the materials on the disk, which must be decoded for ease and efficiency of access, but there is nothing peculiarly "IBYCUS oriented" about this disk. The TLG "C" disk also includes indexing at some level, although the IBYCUS access program does not make use of this feature. (2) A "sister CD-ROM" to the TLG "C" disk has been prepared by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in cooperation with CCAT. For details see OFFLINE 17. This disk is intended to be in the same "High Sierra" format as the TLG "C" disk, and to employ the TLG "Beta coding" for ID-locators. The IBYCUS software can read the PHI/CCAT CD-ROM, which has been mastered and is about to be released for distribution. CCAT also has "experimental" software for reading this disk from IBM type machines. This disk does not contain indices. (3) It is not difficult to treat the CD-ROM as a source from which to offload particular texts or portions of texts, so that a user's favorite software can then be applied to the offloaded material. This is true on IBYCUS or on IBM, and is perhaps the most obvious use of a CD-ROM for the "average" user who is not yet in a position to make more sophisticated direct use of the materials. For people who want to have access to large bodies of texts, even if only for offloading, the economic and storage advantages are tremendous. I can give concrete figures, as examples, if anyone cares. Finally, to Susan's question -- what research benefit does my access to CD-ROM (via IBYCUS, I confess) offer? Apart from the obvious searching and selecting, which can include searching the entire corpus of available Greek (or Latin, etc.) material for a given word, phrase, combination of words, etc., I use the CD-ROMs as a reference point for quality control (correction of errors; no small matter, at this point!), as a convenient source for offloading (no need to hunt for the tape, mount it, etc.), and as a gigantic pool in which to hunt for identifying papyri scraps, unknown quotations/allusions, etc. (a special kind of searching). Basically, they are at present for me repositories and bases for excerpting and sophisticated index-type searches. I have not yet tried to do anything imaginative with the variety of non-linear or extended-linear files on the PHI/CCAT disk -- e.g. morphological analysis, parallel texts, text with variants, word lists. But they are there for the experimenting! Bob Kraft, CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 09:16:55 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: IBYCUS in Europe (17 lines) ------------------ From Bob Kraft In response to Keith Whitelam's footnote, it is my understanding that John Dawson at Cambridge has agreed to act as a representative of IBYCUS for European (or at least British) distribution. Bob Kraft, CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 09:18:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: Are CDROMs all that marvellous (43 lines) ------------------------- From Charles Faulhaber Scholarly activities aided by CD-ROMS: 1) Textual criticism. To be able to check the usus scribendi of an author, an age, or an entire corpus would be an enormous boon for the establishment of texts. It simply cannot be done now except in the very simplest of cases. 2) Historical linguistics: First attestations of word usage are important for lexical studies of all sorts, but so are last attestations. At this point it is impossible to say "This is the last time word x" is used. With the TLG we can say this with a very high degree of certainty. I'm with the CD-ROM people (but it doesn't have to be CD-ROM). Access in any reasonable fashion to the entire machine-readable corpus of a given literature will revolutionize the study of that literature. I would like to see some thought given to software for semantic access, probably some sort of thesaurus approach. This may already exist, but my ignorance is vast .... ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 09:25:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs (51 lines) ------------------------- From ghb@ecsvax (George Brett) Hullo from mid-south. My work with micro concordances is minimal... I have watched Randall Jones do a presentation of BYU Concordance. I may be off course, so please accept my apologies early on. Now, about this cd-rom business and concordances and hypertext. Have you seen a HyperCard stack named Texas? This stack has the ability to index a text file at a rate of 3Mb per hour. The result of the indexing are two "lists" and the text file. The first list is a word list that is alphabetically sorted, numbered by frequency, and can be searched. Once a word is selected from list one you are presented list two. List two shows the word you have selected in a one line context sitution. Each line has the selected word centered on the screen with text to the left and right on the same line. When you find a line that appears to meet your criteria you select that line and then Texas presents you the paragraph in the original text file with the word in it. (verbally that's the best I can get at the moment.) If you have access to a Mac with HyperCard I would be most willing to mail you a copy of this package. The author has expressly mentioned that it is intended for CD-ROM application. I would be interested to hear what someone more familiar with concordance packages would have to say. Cordially -- -- george George Brett (not the baseball player) Manager, Academic Services UNC-Educational Computing Service ghb@ecsvax.UUCP or ghb@ecsvax.BITNET or ECSGHB@TUCC.BITNET >work: UNC-ECS POB 12035 RTP NC 27709-2035 919/549-0671 >home: 1408 Alabama Ave. Durham, NC 27705 919/286-9235 ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 12:23:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs and the problem of defining a "corpus" --------------------------- From Dr Abigail Ann Young I'm not acquainted in detail with the CD-ROM (or any other version!) of the TLG, although I've used the printed TLL a great deal, so I may be misinformed about what I'm going to say as it pertains to the TLG as opposed to the TLL. But unless the TLG project did as the DOE project has done, and edited from MSS. all the hither-to UNpublished writings in Classical Greek, Koine, patristic, & Byzantine Greek, you cannot use to it determine the earliest occurrence or the latest occurence of a word in Greek. Similarly, I cannot now use the TLL to find the earliest or last occurrence of a given word in Latin. I can find the earliest or last occurrences of words in PRINTED works/MSS. I think it is important for those of us who work with languages like Latin to remember that, even with the best CD-ROMs, software, et al., we are still restricted in our analyses to a comparatively small portion of the actual surviving texts because only a comparatively small portion of those texts have been edited and printed. (And I wouldn't want to think about the problem of how many of them have been edited well!) We can perhaps analyse and study the available corpus of Latin or Greek literature on CD-ROM much better than in any other form, but we should be careful not to confuse the available corpus with the entire corpus. It is a problem I often experience in my own work, because people are apt to say of a Latin word, "That form doesn't exist!" or "No, it doesn't mean that!" on the basis of the TLL. But the TLL only includes edited and published material, which means that it is entirely possible for other forms and other senses of known forms to exist in many, many MSS. texts of which the TLL is unaware. In our desire to use the latest technology to expand our understanding of a language or a literature, we mustn't forget how much work remains to be done in the locating, editing, and publishing (in whatever form, print or electronic) of writings still in MSS. or on papyrus, etc. I doubt even a Kurtzweil and a 386 machine could help much with that! Abigail Ann Young REED ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 12:28:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CDROMMERIE (24 lines) -------------------------------------- From David Nash Beryl T. Atkins thanks you for the (first 15) reponses on CD-ROM. " Have only scanned the Humanist responses so far but wonder if it's worth making the point that what we're thinking of putting onto CDROM now would be a corpus of general English, with a front end allowing selection (& downloading to one's own computer) of node-word concordances of flexible length. It's really a research linguist's tool. We have also of course thought of putting out dictionaries on CDROM, I suspect these too would be for the researcher rather than the sporadic user or the dic freak browsing through etymologies at midnight." -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 16:19:11 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Long-term storage of electronic texts (37 lines) ----------------------------------- From Ian Lancashire A journal called Electronic Library intermittently publishes interesting articles about electronic methods of storing text. The general impression given by these is that computer-readable media, including CD-ROM, offer much less of a storage life than acid-free paper or (best) microform. Since an alarming percentage of existing library collections is already irrevocably lost to this slow fire, and since most of us are using electronic storage for our own work, may I pose a question? What is the most secure method of storing machine-readable text and how long many years does that method offer us? The best solution for mass storage I know of has been termed videomicrographics by Dennis Moralee ("Facing the Limitations of Electronic Document Handling", Electronic Library 3.3 [July 1985]: 210--17). This proposes very high-resolution page images stored with conventional micrographics and then -- here's where mother CPU comes in -- output electronically by scanning when (and only when) the user asks for the page(s). This method is, in theory, technology-independent and reliable. I hope my colleagues and students will begin to make good use of concordances and indexes of vast archives of literature on CD-ROM and the like, but a better use of our efforts might be to save some fragments of the past 150 years from the fires of acid paper. ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 16:27:44 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: In defense of write-only (59 lines) ------------------------------------ From (M.J. CONNOLLY [Slavic/Eastern]) I restricted my reply about CD-ROM usage to the read-only formats because the question seems to have come from the publishing quarter. I do, however, agree with Bjorndahl that the issue of read/write deserves attention and his caveat is well put. One important consideration, which humanists must appreciate, is the matter of _authority_ in data. When I read something in a reference work I can be reasonably certain that what I see at line m on page n is the same as what another reader has in another copy of the same edition. Not so, however, if those contents were in a read/write format. Short of edit-trails, which few will be likely to implement or respect, we could never be sure whose Dante we are really reading. The same difference applies in music with LPs and CDs on the one hand versus the far more volatile and editable tape media on the other hand. Why is the recording industry in the US ashiver at the prospect of digital audio tape decks? Granted, they could care less whether the Mozart in your living room is echt, but they do see that they forfeit control in a read/write scheme. For many of our needs, that same control rigidity serves as a blessing. I should not feel able to place scholarly reliance on a work presented in a medium where anyone else may have been before me, dickying around at leisure. If you've used some one else's Home stack in Hypercard or an editable spell-checker in a public facility, you'll understand the feeling on a minor scale. This is also why an MIS officer at your institution will prefer to maintain his own database and job mailing labels and reports when you need them, rather than letting you have a copy of the database with which to make your own. Without linked editing of the copies (then virtually a shared file) changes to A do not appear in B and v.v. The second issue with read/write involves availability and standards. CD-ROM is here, and the manufacturers are in near uniform agreement about the standards for the emerging alternate formats. (See also what I wrote about the intended upgrade paths). Read/write is still not here yet, and I see no guarantee that we shall be spared the CBS:RCA-color-television duel or the VHS:Beta wars or the interactive laserdisc skirmishes whenever speedy products appear at affordable prices. For the meantime we should not put important work on hold to wait for the next stage of the technology -- there is always an exciting next stage. Yet even when we do have useful read/write, the need for read-only will not have passed. Prof M.J. Connolly Slavic & Eastern Languages Boston College / Carney 236 Chestnut Hill MA 02167 ( U . S . A .) (617)552-3912 cnnmj@bcvax3.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 18:48:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMS *are* marvellous (73 lines) ------------------------------------ From Sterling Bjorndahl Susan Hockey asks if CD ROMS are marvellous. All I can say is that the Ibycus system provides a relatively cheap way for people to be able to do linear searches, as she describes. Cheap both in terms of money (if your department buys it) and time. And even though it is just a linear search it has revolutionized the way we do research here at Claremont. It is becoming unacceptable here for us as graduate students to write a paper without checking through and digesting several centuries worth of Greek literature. Let me give an example. I wanted to find out something about in what context a man and a woman could recline on the same couch in a meal setting. This was in an examination of the Gospel of Thomas saying 61, in which Jesus says "Two will rest on a couch; the one will die, and the other will live." Salome replies: "Who do you think you are, big shot? You've been up on my couch and eaten from my table!" (implying: which of us two is going to die, you or I?). This is an amusing Cynic-type chreia which goes on to be elaborated in sayings 62-67 in a rather gnostic fashion. My question was: isn't it a little unusual for Jesus to be on a couch with Salome at all? I am not from a classics background - a situation shared by many in my field - and so I didn't know where to turn to find out about men and women eating together on the same couch. I found a couple of old books dealing with home and family in Greece and Rome, but they were rather popular in orientation and didn't cite many sources to back up their assertions. I knew a little bit about hetaerae, of course, but didn't know if I knew enough to compare Salome's behaviour with that particular role. However with the TLG texts on CD-ROM I was able to pick a few key Greek words to search for. In a half an hour I had twenty pages of references, in context, in which those words appeared together. Over the next few days I was able to digest them and put them into categories of public/private, married or non-married couple, and I paid some attention to time frame, social status, and geographical setting. This resulted in about twenty texts that made a rather nice appendix to a paper (although it suffers from a lack of archeological data, and of course it cannot claim to have *every* relevant text - just enough to argue a case). I really don't know how else I could have done this. I would have not taken the time to search through the index of every volume in the Loeb Classical Library series. It may be that some bright classics person reading this will be able to point me to a monograph dealing with this subject, but as I say, it's not my field and I don't know my way around it very well yet. I couldn't find any secondary literature that helped very much (if you know of some, I'd be grateful to hear about it). So even though it's not CD-I, even though it's just a linear search on a literal string, it has made quite a difference to me and to several other people here. It has allowed us to work conveniently with texts that we may have never before touched. It certainly does not do our work for us - we would not want that. Our work is the digesting and analyzing. Flipping through indices is menial labour that we don't mind letting the machine do. I belive that it is IBM's unofficial motto that reads: "Machines should work. People should think." The more texts I can have at my fingertips, the more I'm going to enjoy making connections that may never have been made before. Sterling Bjorndahl BJORNDAS@CLARGRAD.BITNET ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 18:52:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CATH 88, call for papers (59) ---------------------- From May Katzen --------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- HUMANIST readers are reminded that the deadline for submitting abstracts for the CATH 88 conference is 29th February 1988. --------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS FOR CATH 88 CONFERENCE Computers and Teaching in the Humanities: Re-defining the Humanities? University of Southampton, UK 13th-15th December 1988 The theme this year is the interface between the computer and the humanities disciplines and whether or not traditional assumptions and methods are being supported or challenged by the use of new technologies in higher education. The conference will be mainly devoted to workshops and seminars, and proposals are invited for contributions to workshops. Abstracts of at least 500 words should be sent to: Dr May Katzen Office for Humanities Communication University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH UK Tel: 0533 522598 (from UK) 011 44 533 522598 (from North America) E-mail: MAY @ UK.AC.LEICESTER.VAX Please note that the deadline for receipt of papers is 29TH FEBRUARY 1988. ------------------------------------------------------------- May Katzen Office for Humanities Communication University of Leicester ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 19:00:24 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: academics and apartheid ------------------------------------------ From Sebastian Rahtz Its nothing to do with computers at all, but could I take the opprtunity to suggest to anyone reading this that they consider joining the World Archaeology Congress? For a mere $20 you can be part of a body which is more or less unique (so far as I know) in its commitment to the THE academic subject (archaeology - didnt you know?), to Third World integration into the subject, and to a vision unbiased by geographical or historical constraints. It is founded on the success of the 1986 'anti-apartheid' World Archaeological Congress. If you have never heard of it, find out now by writing to W A C, Department of Archaeology, University, Southampton S09 5NH, UK. I might add that I disagree with much of what WAC has to say about the past and the relationship between ethnic groups and historic remains. But since WAC is the most anarchic body I have yet encountered in academia, and is seriously trying to bring together academia and politics, it gets my vote every time. join WAC or be square.... Sebastian Rahtz Computer Science University Southampton S09 5NH ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 19:02:50 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Large corpora and interdisciplinary poaching (45 lines) Sterling Bjorndahl in his most recent note tells a story I'm sure many of us could repeat in essence: how access to some large textual corpus, such as the TLG, allows a scholar to get a grip on the material of an academic discipline outside his or her training. I certainly can, but I'll spare you most of the details, since Sterling's are as good. Like Sterling I'm not a classicist; like Sterling I found myself forced to poach on the classicists' turf in order to serve research in another field, and I also used the TLG on an Ibycus. I know I didn't find every reference to the Greek words for "mirror" (footnote prowling turned up several the experimental TLG disk didn't produce), but never mind. I found enough to make a sound argument, at least sound enough to get the thing accepted in a classicists' journal. Having so much evidence was, yes, marvellous for all the obvious reasons. My point, again, is to underscore what Sterling noted about the benefit of access to large corpora for us interdisciplinary poachers. Ok, in the good old days, anyone lucky enough to get into a good school would have read classics and, perhaps, have known just where to look for "mirrors," though I doubt the comprehensiveness of *his* knowledge. And yes, the CD-zealot isn't guaranteed a sound argument simply by having mounds of evidence. Intelligence is required. But it IS marvellous for a poorly educated Miltonist to be able to survey 21,000,000 words of Greek so as to be able to make a plausibleGreconstruction of what his intellectual master was talking about. And all this merely by doing a sequential search, with no built-in morphological analysis, no tools for disambiguation. Are you all aware of what Yaacov Choueka and his colleagues have done with the Global Jewish Database, ca. 80 million words of rabbinic Hebrew? If only the Ibycus could run that software! Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 23:19:00 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Scanning query (21 lines) ------------------------------------------ From goer@sophist.uchicago.edu(Richard Goerwitz) Can anyone recommend a decent, inexpensive scanning service that can handle a typset English document whose only catch is a some variation in type size, and some extra, accented characters? -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 23:23:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TEXAS 0.1, in response to George Brett (49 lines) ------------------------------------------ From David Nash >From ghb@ecsvax (George Brett) Date: 10 February 1988, 09:25:46 EST writes: Have you seen a HyperCard stack named Texas? This stack has the ability to index a text file at a rate of 3Mb per hour. The result of the indexing are two "lists" and the text file. And goes on to give a clear description of what Mark Zimmerman's software will do for the Mac user. I would be interested to hear what someone more familiar with concordance packages would have to say. Well, I'm not familiar with a range of concordance packages, but as nice as TEXAS 0.1 is (and at a very nice price), it calls for some additional features to make it a good tool. There are two handicaps I found in the first minutes: (1) A context word cannot be selected from the line- or full-context displays, and then used in turn in the index. One has to return to the word-list screen and type in the desired word. (2) A slice of display (whether index, line-context or page context) cannot be saved to a (ASCII) file. Both these would be no problem if the Clipboard were available from TEXAS, but unfortunately it isn't. I believe Zimmerman would like to hear further suggestions for its improvement. I would use an option of reverse lexicographic indexing for instance, and of suppressing material marked in a certain way (e.g., all material inside square brackets). The approach deserves encouragement, I think. And I like it that he added the HyperCard interface to a previous package. (Zimmerman's browsing package was written in C and used first with Unix.) -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 23:26:26 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text archiving (44 lines) ------------------------------------------ From David Durand Ian Lancashire's posting about the longevity of various forms of machine readable archival brought a few thoughts to mind. The first thought, is agreement with the plea to use the greatest possible speed in moving information from pages printed on acid paper to some more secure form. It would truly be a sad irony if the last 200 years of written production, an accumulated weight (literally) of knowledge and effort, were to be lost to the very technology of inexpensive printing that helped it to be created. However, I think there is a common misconception about the safety of digitally stored data that needs to be addressed. Granted that the longevity of most digital media currently in existence probably cannot be guaranteed to be greater than 30 years, there is a significant difference between digital and analog media. The crucial difference is that digital media do not degrade gradually as they are stored, and they can be speedily duplicated without loss of content in a way that other media cannot. In addition, given the speed of technological change, each copying operation is likely to pack more and more information into one storage unit. This means that over time, the copying process becomes easier and easier. Compare the operation of copying the TLG on magnetic tape to the operation of printing a new copy of the CD-ROM from the master stamping plate. Another factor is that once data is captured in character-based form (i.e. not page images) it can be manipulated much more flexibly than printed, video, or microform media which can only be read by human beings. All of these technologies may be needed in the interim process of converting past knowledge into permanent electronic form. We have to work with what is available, after all. But the fact remains that a computer file is both more easily duplicated without error, and is more useful for research than an image-based representation of the same texts. Perhaps character recognition will eventually solve the problems of converting photographs of badly typeset victorian books into ascii files, but it seems best to go with the most flexible format available. ========================================================================= Date: 10 February 1988, 23:28:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Final SGML posting (64 lines) ------------------------------------------ From David Durand This posting is a joint product with Allen Renear of Brown. A point of terminology: The word `tagset' refers to the set of content entities indicated in a computer stored document. The issue of what tagset to use is independent of the decision to use SGML or not. The point that must be kept in mind about SGML that must be kept in mind is that SGML is *not* a tag set -- it is a language for rigorously declaring a tagset and its associated grammar. An SGML complying file consists of 2 components: (1) the prologue, a header which declares the tags and describes their grammar, and (2) the tagged text itself. The AAP standard describes a tagset -- and gives the associated SGML declarations. That is, it is a tagset that conforms to the SGML standard in having, among other things, an SGML declaration. Many of us believe that the important thing is that SGML provides a standard for declaring and then using tagsets. But attempts to standardize tagsets themselves are much riskier projects. For one thing a great deal of ingenuity and innovation goes into a tagset. For another, a tagset may correspond to a work of scholarship in itself, if the tagged information involves a new interpretation of the the text. Consider, for example, the introduction of paragraphing into a manuscript text, or the scansion of a work previously regarded as ametrical. Tagsets often represent an improved understanding of a text's structure or of the relative importances of different aspects of that structure. The may be innovative, they may be controversial. Not the sort of thing which is ripe for standardization. I understand that University Microfilms is accepting, as an experiment, some dissertations in electronic form -- provided they are marked up in the AAP tagset. Well my dissertation is rigorously marked up -- but there are no AAP tags corresponding to my *primitive_term_introduction* tag, or my *counterexample* tag. In some cases I add detail to what seems to be an AAP analogue: my definition is composed of a *definiendum* and a *definiens* -- so far so good. But my definiens contains *clauses* and my definiendum a *predicate* tag. In more awkward cases there may be semantic incongruities in tagsets that no amount of granularity adjustments will resolve. Such tagsets will be fundamentally incommensurable. Standard tagsets support comparative work, so we should explore them and create them. But we should not hold out too much hope for them if we expect them to be adequate for all applications. Extensibility within a uniform structure is an essential. The important thing is that 1) the manuscript be tagged and 2) the tags and their grammar be declared in a prologue and the 3) the tags be glossed as to their meaning. SGML provides a way of doing 1) and 2) -- without restricting anyone to any particular tagset. The problem of 3) -- standardizing a semantic gloss -- is still up for grabs -- but I doubt if much more can be done than to describe their meaning as clearly as possible in English. ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 16:12:15 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM Bibliography ------------------------------------------ From Bob Kraft A footnote to my nuancing [Lou B. wonders about the use of "nuance" as a verb; is this unusual?] of Susan Hockey's comments on CD-ROM: For a more extensive and balanced treatment of the state of text oriented CD-ROM development as of a year ago, see the article by Linda W. Helgerson entitled "CD-ROM: the Basis for Scholarly Research in Higher Education" in the periodical publication called _CD Data Report_ 3.2 (December 1986) 15-18 (Langley Publications, 1350 Beverly Road, Suite 115-324, McLean, VA 22101). This "Profile" report covers TLG, the Brown-Harvard Isocrates Project (TLG disk "B"), the new Perseus Project of Gregory Crane at Harvard, CCAT, and PHI. It also includes a bibliography and set of relevant addresses. Finally, Randall Smith of University of California in Santa Barbara should be urged to say something in some detail about his work with the TLG "B" disk on IBM type machines, building on the Brown-Harvard development. He is 6500RMS@UCSBUXB.BITNET and should not be bothered too much or his graduate program work will suffer. But he has done important work in this important area. Bob Kraft, CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 16:20:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: PhD exams in humanities computing ( ------------------------------------------ From Nancy Ide I sympathize with the problem of putting HUMANIST mail aside for several days with good intentions to get to it later. If I actually do get to it eventually, I find another problem arises: the topic I'd like to comment on has been abandoned in the current discussions. With this as a preface I'd like to say something about Sterling Bjorndal's question concerning PhD exams in humanities computing. Bob Kraft made a good point: I, too, would be reluctant to consider a PhD exam that focusses on the computer-as-tool, and I too don't see the fact that courses are offered in the field as reason enough to argue that a PhD exam is appropriate--such a course in the field of English literature is effectively an extension of the methods course that every graduate student is required to take, but which no one would consider the basis of a PHD exam. However, I can see an exam in computer-as-method, or, put more broadly, quantitative methods--especially where the focus is on the the relationship between quantitative methodology and more traditional methods. In literary studies, at least, understanding the critical approach that quantitiative methods embody and fitting them into the critical context is a substantial task. I have argued before that courses in literary computing should include ample consideration of the critical approach that the methodology embodies, and that especially for beginning graduate students, such consideration is essential in order to prevent the inappropriate or at least, ill-considered use of computers for literary research. I can also see PhD exams in areas that support humanities computing that involve a substantial theoretical component. For instance, an exam that focussed on certain relevant areas within computer science (such as formal language and parsing theories, or data base theory and design) or linguistics or both would make sense. The answer to the question about offering PhD exams in humanities computing, then, is no in my opinion--not if the focus is tools or applications. However, there are substantially theoretical aspects to humanities computing that could justify such an exam. My remarks are made in the context of what I know best--literary and linguistic studies. I hope that those of you who are in other fields can determine whether what I say makes sense in relation to your own disciplines. Nancy Ide ide@vassar --note that my address has been and may continue to be incorrectly specified in message headers as ide@vas780 or ide@vaspsy. Please note that these addresses are incorrect and mail should be sent to ide@vassar. The problem should clear up in a few weeks. ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 16:23:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Time as a commodity (20 lines) ------------------------------------------ From Brian Molyneaux Mike Stairs makes some interesting comments about the value of time - at least, his time - but I wonder if there is not some advantage in the physical activity of working, in that spending more time with the undivided object - a text, an image - may help one conceive of new ways of seeing it. when I get the money, I'm going to get my 386 with as much memory as I can cram into it, and shove in the best time-saving and time-segmenting software I can get - but I will still spend a lot of time turning pages and dreaming - and, gosh, I might even pick up a pen now and then, for old time's sake. ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 16:29:43 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Packard Humanities Institute (63 lines) [John M. Gleason of The PHI has kindly supplied the following information about his Institute, which has just become a member of HUMANIST. I am publishing his blurb here because it speaks to questions about the PHI's work that have arisen recently. --W.M.] The Packard Humanities Institute 300 Second Street, Suite 201 Los Altos, California 94022 USA Telephone (415) 948-0150 Bitnet xb.m07@stanford All of our activity currently involves collecting and analyzing bodies of text for eventual inclusion in a CD-ROM: 1. We are collecting all Latin writings through some undecided cutoff date. We issued in December 1987 PHI Experimental CD-ROM #1, which contained: 4 million Latin words processed by PHI. These include most of the authors of the Republic. For example, Cicero is complete. Several of these texts have not been available before in machine-readable form, e.g. Quintilian, Celsus, Seneca the Elder. IG 1 and 2, produced at Cornell University under a grant from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. A number of miscellaneous texts produced by the Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts at the University of Penssylvania. Many of these were previously included in the Pilot CD-ROM of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Biblical texts include the Septuagint, New Testament, Hebrew Old Testament, Authorized and Revised Standard Versions. Other texts include Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Aramaic, French, Danish and English. Experimental CD-ROM #1 will be ready for distribution by the end of February 1988. The cost will be very low. 2. PHI is working with outside scholars to produce complete morphological analyses of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. Various other projects are being considered and even dabbled at, but the Latin CD-ROM should occupy us for quite a while. Main PHI personnel: Director: David W. Packard Associate Directors: Stephen V.F. Waite John M. Gleason *****END***** ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 19:32:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Conference on Sentence Processing (212 lines) ------------------------------------------ From Terry Langendoen CUNY FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON HUMAN SENTENCE PROCESSING MARCH 24 - 27, 1988 --------------------------- CORPORATE SPONSORS: BELL COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION --------------------------- - PROGRAM - All meetings (except reception) will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd street in the Auditorium at the Library level. THURSDAY, March 24, 7:00-9:00 pm Evening wine reception at Roosevelt House, Hunter College, 47-49 East 65th Street (between Park and Madison). FRIDAY MORNING, March 25, 9:30-12:30 David Swinney, Janet Nicol, Joan Bresnan, Marilyn Ford, Uli Frauenfelder, and Lee Osterhout--Coreference Processing During Sentence Comprehension. Kenneth Forster--Tapping Shallow Processing with a Sentence Matching Task. Susan M. Garnsey, Michael K. Tanenhaus, and Robert M. Chapman-- Evoked Potentials and the Study of Sentence Comprehension. Wayne Cowart--Notes on the Biology of Syntactic Processing. Merrill Garrett--Semantic and Phonological Structure in Word Retrieval for Language Production. Jose E. Garcia-Albea, Susana Del Viso, and Jose M. Igoa--Movement Errors and Levels of Processing in Sentence Production. pa FRIDAY AFTERNOON 2:30-6:30 Tutorial Sessions 2:30 Recent Developments in Syntactic Theory Edwin Williams, University of Massachusetts 4:30 Computational Studies of Sentence Processing Ronald Kaplan, Stanford University and Xerox Corporation SATURDAY MORNING, March 26, 9:30-1:00 Stuart Shieber--An Architecture for Psycholinguistic Modeling. Amy Weinberg--Minimal Commitment, Deterministic Parsing and the Theory of Garden Paths. Aravind Joshi--Processing Crossed and Nested Dependencies: An Automaton Perspective on the Psycholingistic Results. Eric Sven Ristad--Complexity of Linguistic Models. Joseph Aoun and Samuel S. Epstein--A Computational Treatment of Quantifier Scope. Mark Steedman--Context and Composition. Mark Johnson--Parsing as Deduction: The Use of Knowledge of Language. SATURDAY AFTERNOON 3:00-6:00 Special Session on Ambiguity Resolution Michael K. Tanenhaus, Greg Carlson, Julie Bolard and Susan Garnsey-- Lexical Parallelism. Paul Gorrell--Establish the Loci of Serial and Parallel Effects in Syntactic Processing. Lyn Frazier--Ambiguity Resolution Principles. Martin Chodorow, Harvey Slutsky, and Ann Loring--Parsing Nondeterministic Verb Phrases. Mitch Marcus--Whence Deterministic Parsing? 5:30 Round Table Discussion pa SUNDAY MORNING, March 27, 9:30-12:30 Steven P. Abney--Parsing and Psychological Validity. Thomas G. Bever, Caroline Carrithers, and Brian McElree--The Psychological Reality of Government and Binding Theory. Maryellen MacDonald--Facilitation Effects from NP-Trace in Passive Sentences. Charles Clifton, Jr.--Filling Gaps. Emmon Bach--Understanding Unnatural Language: Dutch and German Verb Clusters. Anthony S. Kroch--Grammatical and Processing Effects on the Appearance of Resumptive Pronouns. pa PREREGISTRATION FORM Name _____________________________________________________________ Address _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ University or corporate affiliation (if not shown above): _____________________________________________________________ Fees may be paid by mail with check or Post Office money order payable to: CUNY Sentence Processing Conference Please circle: STUDENT* NON-STUDENT Advance registration $ 5.00 $15.00 Walk-in registration $10.00 $20.00 *To verify student status, please have a faculty member sign below: ________________ _____________________________________________ Name (printed) Faculty signature Return this form to: Human Sentence Processing Conference Linguistics Program CUNY Graduate Center 33 West 42nd St. New York, N.Y. 10036 __ Check here to be put on a list for crash space. (You will need to bring sleeping bag. Assume no smoking unless specially arranged). Any special needs (we will try to accommodate): ___________________________________________________________________ A small demonstration area will be open on Friday and Saturday from 12-2pm and for two hours after the afternoon sessions. An IBM-XT with 512K internal memory and a Symbolics 3620 (Rel.7.1) can be made available for running demonstrations. Please check the appropriate box if you wish to do a demo on one of these machines and provide a brief description of your program. IBM-XT ________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ Symbolics _________________________________________________________ 3620 _________________________________________________________ pa FOR FURTHER INFORMATION Call: (212) 642-2173 Write: Human Sentence Processing Conference Linguistics Program CUNY Graduate Center 33 West 42nd Street New York, N.Y. 10036 Email: TERGC@CUNYVM or JDF@CUNYVMS1 (Bitnet) ========================================================================= Date: 11 February 1988, 22:10:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Job advertisement (24 lines) ------------------------------------------ From Vicky Walsh UCLA Humanities Computing Facility has a job open for a programmer/analyst with experience in the Humanities. I am looking for someone with lots of micro experience, UNIX knowledge, use, or experience, knowledge of networking, but especially a technical person with a good grounding in the humanities and what humanists do for a living. If you are interested, or know anyone who is, contact me via bitnet (IMD7VAW@UCLAMVS) or send a letter and resume to: Vicky A. Walsh, Humanities Computing, 2221B Bunche Hall, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave, LA, CA 90024-1499. PH: 213/206-1414. I will be at Calico later this month, if anyone would like to talk to me about the job. Vicky Walsh ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 09:16:24 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD what? ------------------------------------------ From Sarah Rees Jones Quiet voice from the slip-stream, "What EXACTLY is CD-ROM?" ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 09:56:52 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TEXAS 0.1 from science@nems.arpa (66 lines) ------------------------------------------ From David Nash [Lightly edited -DGN] Date: 11 Feb 88 06:57 EST From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann) Subject: Re: For HUMANIST: TEXAS 0.1 tnx for comments/suggestions re TEXAS! Note that the version number is 0.1 -- not meaning to imply completeness.... [Index or context displays can be copied to the Clipboard: ] I deliberately made the buttons that cover those fields a few pixels too small to entirely shield the text area. Try moving the HyperCard 'hand' cursor to the very edge (left or right) of the index or context pseudo-scrolling display, and it should turn into an I-beam, so that you may select that text and copy/paste it ad lib. (Alternatively, hit the "tab" key and the entire contents of the field gets selected.) Sorry that I didn't document that. [...] as for the problem in pasting into the "Jump to..." dialog box, that's HyperCard's fault, and (I hope!) will be fixed in a new release of that program soon. Also, you are of course free to shrink the buttons yourself if you want a different arrangement -- that's what HyperCard is for, user flexibility.... [...] To unlock the stack so that you can move buttons around, resize them, change fonts, etc., hold down command key before you pull down the HC 'File' menu -- that lets you choose "Protect Stack..." and raise the user level above Typing. The saving to ASCII file is easy under MultiFinder -- and you can certainly copy and accumulate arbitrary chunks of ASCII text and export them via scrapbook/clipboard/etc. Unfortunately, the current version of HyperCard isn't friendly enough to allow continuously-open desk accessories, so unless you have extra memory enough to run MultiFinder with HC, the procedure is a trifle inconvenient. That's why I provided the "Notes Card", which of course you're free to make multiple copies of, modify at will, etc. Hyper-Card limits text fields to 32kB each, which is another inconvenience.... I will think about how to make jumping around in the Index better ... would like to allow a special (perhaps option-click?) on Context or Text words to jump the Index to that point, but haven't figured out a good implementation yet. Proximity searching (subindexing as in my UNIX-type C progs for browsing) is a higher priority at this time, for me ... really need to be able to cut down on the search space when indices get big.... As mentioned on the TEXAS v.0.1 stack, all my C source code is available if anybody wants to do any of these extensions -- send a formatted Mac disk, self-addressed stamped envelope, and $2 or less to me to get it. (I need to subsidize my son who does the disk dup'ing.) [...] ~z ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 16:57:35 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM and related technology at Penn ------------------------------------------ From Jack Abercrombie Bob K. neglected to report on all forms of CD-ROM and related technology available within CCAT. We have two addition WORM drives installed in a computer lab on campus. These WORMs (400 megs of storage) are used heavily in the following ways: 1. Masters for gang copying of the New Testament, LXX, and other texts are stored on the WORMs. Our staff loads individual diskettes with duplicate of parts of the texts from the WORMs over a network. 2. The South Asia Department and other departments at Penn have archival texts stored on the WORMs for use by faculty and graduate students. The students can search and concord texts off the WORMs or copy the texts to their diskettes for use in another installation. Incidentally we have a major effort this year in transfering our Asian language holdings into electronic form much as we did last year for modern Russian poetry. 3. The WORMs also hold digitized pictures of material for papyrology, language instruction, and textual research in which pictorial information is closely linked to ASCII texts. A user can access the WORMs and search both texts and pictures together. Jack Abercrombie Director of CCAT, Assistant Dean for Computing, University of Pennsylvania ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 22:45:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ibycus UK ------------------------------------------ From John L. Dawson My company (Humanities Computing Consultants Ltd) has the agency for distributing Ibycus machines in Britain, so I am in close touch with everyone in Britain who has an Ibycus (all of them micro versions). ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 22:47:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TLG CD-ROM B usage (50 lines) ------------------------------------------ From Randall M. Smith <6500rms@UCSBUXB.BITNET> This is a partially rewritten copy of a letter which I sent directly to Susan Hockey. I think it will serve as a brief description of the work which I have been doing. I wasn't sure if people in HUMANIST would be interested in all of these details, but I will gladly share them: At the Classics Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, we are using the TLG CD-ROM #B, which was indexed by Greg Crane at the Harvard Classics department and Paul Kahn at IRIS at Brown. We are using it on an AT clone with software which I have been adapting from Greg Crane's UNIX software. It is true that sequential searching on the AT is abysmally slow, but the index searching is very fast. We can find a word with a few occurrences on the entire disc in less than a minute, and displaying the Greek text on the screen takes another minute or two. While this is not as fast as a program like the BYU concordance program, this is working with a database over 200MB in size. Since this is not a commercial system, we do have free access to the text, and pointers to the correct place in the text are provided by the index system. This seems to me the ideal compromise since we can revert to a (slow) sequential search if we ever need to. We are currently working to include relational searches, which can be implemented fairly easily using the information provided by the indices. It should be fairly quick, though it may not be exactly "interactive." Also, we are using a general purpose CD filing system (the Comapct Disc Filing System, developed by Simson Garfinkel at the MIT media lab) which is rather slow; I am sure that we could speed operations immensely by replacing this with a CD interface designed specifically for this application. Because of my experience with the indices I am all in favor of indices being provided on the TLG and PHI CD-ROM's. I am told that the new TLG CD-ROM #C has an index system which provides the number of occurrences of a word in each author, but no references into the text to retrieve the context. I suppose that this eliminates scanning an author who does not use a given word, but it is still a lengthy process to search the entire disc. In any case, we are using our system to search for occurrences of words; we recently looked for _monadikes_ in conjunction with _stigmes_, though we had to do the correlations by hand. (We actually used the same technique which we are writing into the software.) We also ran a search for words built on the stem _vaukrar-_ for a professor in the history department. One of our professors is working on a project which will involve searching for specific verb stems in conjunction with certain endings. Also, students in Greek Prose Composition have used the computer to verify the existence of various forms or stems in Attic Prose authors. We have not yet tried to do any sort of thematic searching or anything that sophisticated, but we have been quite pleased so far. I would be pleased to answer any questions that anyone may have about our software. (If people are interested in the nitt-gritty on the index system I would be happy to post a brief description of how it works.) I would also be interested in other people's ideas about or experience with indices on CD-ROM's. Randall M. Smith (6500RMS@UCSBUXB.BITNET) Department of Classics University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 22:50:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Job advertisement (39 lines) ------------------------------------------ From Susan Kruse KING'S COLLEGE LONDON University of London COMPUTING CENTRE The post of ASSISTANT DIRECTOR HUMANITIES AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT is available within the Centre. This senior post, supported by 6 specialist staff, carries particular responsibility for developing and supporting computing applications in the Humanities Departments, an area of the Centre's work to which the College attaches great importance. The successful applicant will play a crucial role as the Centre carries through a major expansion of its computing and communications facilities at all levels from the micro to the mainframe. The College's central computing provision will be based on a large VAX Cluster. Applicants should possess a degree in an appropriate discipline and be able to demonstrate a substantial degree of relevant computing and managerial experience. The appointment will be made at a suitable point, depending on age, qualifications and experience, on the academic-related grade 5 scale (1st March 1988): #21,055 - 24,360 per annum including London Allowance. Further particulars and application forms may be obtained from the Assistant Personnel Officer, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS. The closing date for the receipt of applications is 2nd March 1988. ========================================================================= Date: 12 February 1988, 23:06:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: whos to blame (57 lines!) ------------------------------------------ From Sebastian Rahtz ok, lets see who dominates HUMANIST; i just took my HUMANIST backlog (I keep most of it) for the last six months or so, and picked out those whose name I could easily identify (is those with decent mail headers!),which gave me 121 messages. The following appeared once: ked@coral.berkeley.edu Robert Amsler Tom Benson John Bradley Dan Brink Robin C. Cover Jim Cerny Dan Church Stephen DeRose Charles Faulhaber Robert Gauthier David Graham Doug Hawthorne Susan Hockey Randall Jones May Katzen Bob Kraft Ian Lancashire Joanne M. Badagliacco George M. Logan Brian Molyneaux Elli Mylonas Stephen Page Rosanne Potter Sarah Rees Jones Laine Ruus David Sitman Mike Stairs Wayne Tosh Vicky Walsh Keith Whitelam Ronnie de Sousa the following twice: George Brett Allen H. Renear Charles Faulhaber M.J. CONNOLLY Malcolm Brown Jack Abercrombie Randall Smith Terry Langendoen and thrice: Richard Goerwitz Lou Burnard Dr Abigail Ann Young and four times Sterling Bjorndahl Norman Zacour but the winners are: 5 Dominik Wujastyk 5 David Durand 5 Nancy Ide 5 David Nash 5 Michael Sperberg-McQueen 5 Robert Amsler 6 Mark Olsen 6 James H. Coombs 6 Bob Kraft I have left out myself and Willard....... sebastian rahtz PS please dont bother checking this; I just spent 2 minutes with 'grep' and 'sort' while waiting for something. Lou Burnard promises a proper analysis ========================================================================= Date: 14 February 1988, 14:54:44 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Utility of CD-ROMs (30 lines) ------------------------------------------ From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) The question of utility of CD-ROMs involves both the issue of what type of data one would want on CD-ROMs, which affects how many people would buy the CD-ROM--but also how they would want to access that data. I believe this was mentioned several months ago as an issue for CD-ROM. I would expect CD-ROM access to be such that I could easily download any portion of the available information for further manipulation, editing, etc. CD-ROMs lacking such accessibility would not be totally impractical, but would only be attractive to a subset of the total potential users. If CD-ROM publishers decide that they wish to prohibit this kind of access and only provide the equivalent of contemporary database access, to selected items without downloading permission--then I am more pessimistic about the future of CD-ROM apart from a storage medium incorporated into specific hardware-based systems intended solely for the use of that CD-ROM. ========================================================================= Date: 15 February 1988, 12:54:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: What is CD-ROM? (23 lines) ------------------------------------------ From M.J. CONNOLLY (Slavic/Eastern) For Sarah Rees Jones: 'Tain't exactly the most up-to-date presentation any more, but your question will perhaps find a ready answer in Laub, Leonard: "What is CD ROM?" ex: Lambert, Steve / Suzanne Ropiequet: _CD ROM. The new papyrus._ (Microsoft Press) Redmond WA, 1986c. ISBN: 0-914845-74-8 TK7882.C56N49 1986 Other articles in this uneven but highly informative collection may also answer some of the questions others may be afraid to ask (but bravo to you for asking!). ========================================================================= Date: 15 February 1988, 16:12:57 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: This is a test (11 lines) AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! ========================================================================= Date: 16 February 1988, 16:25:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A file-server for HUMANIST (104 lines) Dear Colleague: You may recall that some months ago we began trying to set up a file-server here so that HUMANISTs could download files of common interest without having to trouble anyone other than themselves. At long last, due to the untiring efforts of Steve Younker, our Postmaster, we seem to have succeeded. Here are instructions on how to use this file-server. Two separate but very similar operations will usually be required: (1) to discover what files the file-server has to offer; and (2) to request one of these. What you do will depend on the kind of system you are using and the network to which it is attached. We think the following is complete, but we are quite prepared to be told that some variation has been overlooked. If you have trouble and think that it is attributable to faulty or missing instructions, please let us know. Note that in the following what you type is in caps; all semicolons and periods are not part of the commands to be typed; and addresses expressed as USERID AT NODENAME may have to be entered as USERID@NODENAME. A. If you are on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN and use an IBM VM/CMS system: - for (1) send the interactive command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET HUMANIST FILELIST HUMANIST - for (2) send the command: TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET fn ft HUMANIST where fn = filename, ft = filetype (of the file you've chosen) B. If you are on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN and use a Vax VMS system, you may be able to use the following interactive procedure: - for (1) type: SEND/REMOTE UTORONTO LISTSERV you should get the prompt: (UTORONTO)LISTSERV: then type: GET HUMANIST FILELIST HUMANIST - for (2) repeat the above but substitute GET fn ft HUMANIST, where fn and ft are as above. C. If you are on Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN but don't use an IBM VM/CMS system, or if you are not on Bitnet, etc.: - for (1) use your mailer of whatever kind, e.g., MAIL, to send an ordinary message to LISTSERV AT UTORONTO and include as the one and only line, GET HUMANIST FILELIST HUMANIST This should be on the first line of mail message. In other words, there should be no blank lines pGeceding this line. - for (2) repeat the above but substitute for the first line GET fn ft HUMANIST, where fn and ft are as above. D. As an alternative to B, use whatever command you have to send a file, e.g., SENDFILE, to LISTSERV AT UTORONTO, the first and only line of this file being again, for (1): GET HUMANIST FILELIST HUMANIST and for (2) GET fn ft HUMANIST At the moment the offerings are not extensive, and you've probably all seen what's there, but we'd be pleased if you would test the procedures anyhow. If you have enduring material of possible interest to HUMANISTs, please consider submitting it for storage on our file-server. Send me a note describing what you have and I'll let you know. Since space on the server is not infinite, we need to exercise some restraint. Yours, Willard McCarty (mccarty@utorepas ) Steve Younker (postmstr@utoronto ) ========================================================================= Date: 16 February 1988, 19:57:52 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More on software viruses (138 lines) ---------------------------- From Y. Radai , with thanks Issue 74 of the Info-IBMPC digest contained a description of a "virus" discovered at Lehigh University which destroys the contents of disks after propagating itself to other disks four times. Some of us here in Israel, never far behind other countries in new achievements (good or bad), are suffering from what appears to be a local strain of the virus. Since it may have spread to other countries (or, for all we know, may have been im- ported from abroad), I thought it would be a good idea to spread the word around. Our version, instead of inhabiting only COMMAND.COM, can infect any ex- ecutable file. It works in two stages: When you execute an infected EXE or COM file the first time after booting, the virus captures interrupt 21h and inserts its own code. After this has been done, whenever any EXE file is executed, the virus code is written to the end of that file, increasing its size by 1808 bytes. COM files are also affected, but the 1808 bytes are written to the beginning of the file, another 5 bytes (the string "MsDos") are written to the end, and this extension occurs only once. The disease manifests itself in at least three ways: (1) Because of this continual increase in the size of EXE files, such programs eventually be- come too large to be loaded into memory or there is insufficient room on the disk for further extension. (2) After a certain interval of time (apparently 30 minutes after infection of memory), delays are inserted so that execution of programs slows down considerably. (The speed seems to be reduced by a factor of 5 on ordinary PCs, but by a smaller factor on faster models.) (3) After memory has been infected on a Friday the 13th (the next such date being May 13, 1988), any COM or EXE file which is executed on that date gets deleted. Moreover, it may be that other files are also af- fected on that date; I'm still checking this out. (If this is correct, then use of Norton's UnErase or some similar utility to restore files which are erased on that date will not be sufficient.) Note that this virus infects even read-only files, that it does not change the date and time of the files which it infects, and that while the virus cannot infect a write-protected diskette, you get no clue that an at- tempt has been made by a "Write protect error" message since the pos- sibility of writing is checked before an actual attempt to write is made. It is possible that the whole thing might not have been discovered in time were it not for the fact that when the virus code is present, an EXE file is increased in size *every* time it is executed. This enlargement of EXE files on each execution is apparently a bug; probably the intention was that it should grow only once, as with COM files, and it is fortunate that the continual growth of the EXE files enabled us to discover the virus much sooner than otherwise. From the above it follows that you can fairly easily detect whether your files have become infected. Simply choose one of your EXE files (preferably your most frequently executed one), note its length, and ex- ecute it twice. If it does not grow, it is not infected by this virus. If it does, the present file is infected, and so, probably, are some of your other files. (Another way of detecting this virus is to look for the string "sUMsDos" in bytes 4-10 of COM files or about 1800 bytes before the end of EXE files; however, this method is less reliable since the string can be altered without attenuating the virus.) If any of you have heard of this virus in your area, please let me know; perhaps it is an import after all. (Please specify dates; ours was noticed on Dec. 24 but presumably first infected our disks much earlier.) Fortunately, both an "antidote" and a "vaccine" have been developed for this virus. The first program cures already infected files by removing the virus code, while the second (a RAM-resident program) prevents future in- fection of memory and displays a message when there is any attempt to in- fect it. One such pair of programs was written primarily by Yuval Rakavy, a student in our Computer Science Dept. In their present form these two programs are specific to this particular virus; they will not help with any other, and of course, the author of the present virus may develop a mutant against which these two programs will be ineffective. On the other hand, it is to the credit of our people that they were able to come up with the above two programs within a relatively short time. My original intention was to put this software on some server so that it could be available to all free of charge. However, the powers that be have decreed that it may not be distributed outside our university except under special circumstances, for example that an epidemic of this virus actually exists at the requesting site and that a formal request is sent to our head of computer security by the management of the institution. Incidentally, long before the appearance of this virus, I had been using a software equivalent of a write-protect tab, i.e. a program to prevent writing onto a hard disk, especially when testing new software. It is called PROTECT, was written by Tom Kihlken, and appeared in the Jan. 13, 1987 issue of PC Magazine; a slightly amended version was submitted to the Info-IBMPC library. Though I originally had my doubts, it turned out that it is effective against this virus, although it wouldn't be too hard to develop a virus or Trojan horse for which this would not be true. (By the way, I notice in Issue 3 of the digest, which I received only this morning, that the version of PROTECT.ASM in the Info-IBMPC library has been replaced by another version submitted by R. Kleinrensing. However, in one respect the new version seems to be inferior: one should *not* write-protect all drives above C: because that might prevent you from writing to a RAMdisk or an auxiliary diskette drive.) Of course, this is only the beginning. We can expect to see many new viruses both here and abroad. In fact, two others have already been dis- covered here. In both cases the target date is April 1. One affects only COM files, while the other affects only EXE files. What they do on that date is to display a "Ha ha" message and lock up, forcing you to cold boot. Moreover (at least in the EXE version), there is also a lockup one hour after infection of memory on any day on which you use the default date of 1-1-80. (These viruses may actually be older than the above-described virus, but simply weren't noticed earlier since they extend files only once.) The author of the above-mentioned anti-viral software has now extended his programs to combat these two viruses as well. At present, he is con- centrating his efforts on developing broad-spectrum programs, i.e. programs capable of detecting a wide variety of viruses. Just now (this will give you an idea of the speed at which developments are proceeding here) I received notice of the existence of an anti-viral program written by someone else, which "checks executable files and reports whether they include code which performs absolute writes to disk, disk for- matting, writes to disk without updating the FAT, etc." (I haven't yet received the program itself.) Y. Radai Computation Center Hebrew University of Jerusalem RADAI1@HBUNOS.BITNET ========================================================================= Date: 16 February 1988, 20:05:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: IBM Regional Conference in Princeton, NJ (126 lines) ---------------------------- From Jack Abercrombie IBM CONFERENCE ON ACADEMIC COMPUTING sponsored by Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and IBM Corporation I have selected out the following presentations that relate to computing in the Humanities from the IBM Regional Conference to be held in Princeton N.J. on 18th-19th March. This regional IBM conference is different than other such conferences this year in that the emphasis here is on humanities computing rather than computing in the hard sciences or engineering. On the 18th March, colleagues will present their work in panel discussions and seminar sessions. On the 19th, there will be general demonstration of software. Any readers interested in further details on the conference may write to me directly. Thank you. ********************************************************************* 10:00-NOON (March 18, 1988) FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION R. Allen Computers and Proficiency-Based Language Acquisition: (Univ. of PA) The Case of Arabic P.A. Batke CAI on Micros at Duke University (Duke Univ.) D.F. Sola TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: Databased Foreign Language Writing (Cornell Univ.) R.M. Wakefield The Development of Listening Comprehension in (Univ. Minn.) German with IBM AT, InfoWindow and Laserdisk Video CONCURRENT PANELS(10:00-noon) NOT LISTED HERE: Economics, Psychology, Technology-based curriculum development, and Information Sharing. 1:30-3:00 HISTORY W.O. Beeman Linking the Continents of Knowledge (Brown Univ.) D.W. Miller The Great American History Machine (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) J.E. Semonche Encountering the Past: Computer Simulations in (Univ. of N.C.) U.S. history PANEL DISCUSSION on LANGUAGE & LITERATURE J.S. Noblitt (Cornell University), P.A. Batke (Duke University), R.L. Jones (Brigham Young University), G.P. Landow (Brown University) USE OF CAD IN ARCHITECTURE/CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY D.G. Romano The Athena Polias Project: (Univ. of PA) Archaeology, Architecture, Athletics and AutoCAD CONCURRENT PANELS(1:30-3:00) NOT LISTED HERE: Mathematics, Instructional Video Disc/CD ROM. 3:30-5:00 ARCHAEOLOGY H. Dibble Interactive Computer Graphics, Imaging and Databasing: (Univ. of PA) Applications to a Stone Age Archaeological Project in France T.D. Price Archaeological Concepts for Undergraduates: (Univ. of Wisc.) The Case of the Mysterious Fugawi R. Saley Two Archaeologically-Based Computer Applications (Harvard Univ.) TEXTUAL ANALYSIS J.R. Abercrombie Teaching Computer-Assisted Research Techniques to (Univ. of PA) Future Scholars R.L. Jones The Creation of a Literary Data Base: Two Approaches (BYU) I. Lancanshire The Art and Science of Text Analysis (Univ. of Toronto) MUSIC R.B. Dannenberg Real Time Music Understand (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) F.T. Hofstetter To be announced (Univ. of Del.) R. Pinkston A Practical Approach to Software Synthesis (Univ. of Texas) on the IBM PC CONCURRENT PANELS(3:30-5:00) NOT LISTED HERE: Biology, Examples of Instructional Computing. ========================================================================= Date: 16 February 1988, 21:38:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A query and a (very brief) return to Hypertext (29 lines) ---------------------------- From Stephen R. Reimer First, I am interested in obtaining a copy of Wilhelm Ott's "TUSTEP" program: can anyone advise me on how to proceed? Secondly, I noticed a series of quotations from Ted Nelson in the February BYTE magazine (p. 14): in case anyone missed it, I offer just a small sampling. "Xanadu /his hypertext system/ is not a conventional project. . . . This is a religion." "The objective is to save humanity before we send it into the garbage pail. We must remove the TV-induced stupor that lies like a fog across the land . . . /and/ make the world safe for smart children." Our children, however, are threatened not only by the influence of TV, but also by the influence of database software: "Compartmentalized and stratified fields produce compartmentalized and stratified minds." These quotations are from a speech given at the Software Entrepreneur's Forum in Palo Alto recently. (He also offered a reflection on publishers and CD-ROMs: "Information lords offering information to information peons.") Is this man sane? Is BYTE misrepresenting him? Stephen Reimer, University of Alberta (SREIMER@UALTAVM) ========================================================================= Date: 17 February 1988, 09:13:41 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Updated report on the Israeli virus (111 lines) [Yisrael Radai has sent me a revised version of his report on the recent MS-DOS virus discovered in Israel. It is intended to replace what I circulated yesterday on this subject. --WM] ---------------------------- From Y. Radai , with thanks Issue 74 of the Info-IBMPC digest contained a description of a "virus" discovered at Lehigh University which destroys the contents of disks after propagating itself to other disks four times. Some of us here in Israel, never far behind other countries in new achievements (good or bad), are suffering from what appears to be a local strain of the virus. Since it may have spread to other countries (or, for all we know, may have been imported from abroad), I thought it would be a good idea to spread the word around. Our version, instead of inhabiting only COMMAND.COM, can infect any execu- table file. It works in two stages: When you execute an infected EXE or COM file the first time after booting, the virus captures interrupt 21h and inserts its own code. After this has been done, whenever any EXE file is executed, the virus code is written to the end of that file, increasing its size by 1808 bytes. COM files are also affected, but the 1808 bytes are written to the beginning of the file, another 5 bytes (the string "MsDos") are written to the end, and this extension occurs only once. The disease manifests itself in at least three ways: (1) Because of this continual increase in the size of EXE files, such programs eventually become too large to be loaded into memory or there is insufficient room on the disk for further extension. (2) After a certain interval of time (apparently 30 minutes after infection of memory), delays are inserted so that execution of programs slows down considerably. (The speed seems to be reduced by a factor of 5 on ordinary PCs, but by a smaller factor on faster models.) (3) After memory has been infected on a Friday the 13th (the next such date being May 13, 1988), any COM or EXE file which is executed on that date gets deleted. Moreover, it may be that other files are also affected on that date (in which case use of Norton's UnErase or some similar utility to restore files which are erased on that date will not be sufficient). Note that this virus infects even read-only files, that it does not change the date and time of the files which it infects, and that while the virus cannot infect a write-protected diskette, you get no clue that an attempt has been made by a "Write protect error" message since the possibility of writing is checked before an actual attempt to write is made. It is possible that the whole thing might not have been discovered in time were it not for the fact that when the virus code is present, an EXE file is increased in size *every* time it is executed. This enlargement of EXE files on each execution is apparently a bug; probably the intention was that it should grow only once, as with COM files, and it is fortunate that the continual growth of the EXE files enabled us to discover the virus much sooner than otherwise. From the above it follows that you can fairly easily detect whether your files have become infected. Simply choose one of your EXE files (preferably your most frequently executed one), note its length, and execute it twice. If it does not grow, it is not infected by this virus. If it does, the present file is infected, and so, probably, are some of your other files. (Another way of detecting this virus is to look for the string "sUMsDos" in bytes 4-10 of COM files or about 1800 bytes before the end of EXE files; however, this method is less reliable since this string can be altered without attenuating the virus. If any of you have heard of this virus in your area, please let me know; perhaps it is an import after all. (Please specify dates; ours was noticed on Dec. 24 but presumably first infected our disks much earlier.) Fortunately, both an "antidote" and a "vaccine" have been developed for this virus. The first program cures already infected files by removing the virus code, while the second (a RAM-resident program) prevents future infection of memory and displays a message when there is any attempt to infect it. One such pair of programs was written primarily by Yuval Rakavy, a student in our Computer Science Dept. In their present form these two programs are specific to this particular virus; they will not help with any other, and of course, the author of the present virus may develop a mutant against which these two programs will be ineffective. On the other hand, it is to the credit of our people that they were able to come up with the above two programs within a relatively short time. My original intention was to put this software on some server so that it could be available to all as a public service. However, the powers that be have decreed that it may not be distributed outside our university unless an epidemic of this virus actually exists at the requesting site and a formal request is sent in writing to our head of computer security by the management of the institution. Incidentally, long before the appearance of this virus, I had been using a software equivalent of a write-protect tab, i.e. a program to prevent writing onto a hard disk, especially when testing new software. It is called PROTECT, was written by Tom Kihlken, and appeared in the Jan. 13, 1987 issue of PC Magazine; a slightly amended version was submitted to the Info-IBMPC library. Though I originally had my doubts, it turned out that it is effective against this virus, although it wouldn't be too hard to develop a virus or Trojan horse for which this would not be true. I have ordered (on a trial basis) a hardware write-protection mechanism which I heard of. If it works, I'll post an evaluation of it to the digest. Of course, this is only the beginning. We can expect to see many new viruses both here and abroad. In fact, two others have already been discovered here. In both cases the target date is April 1. One affects only COM files, while the other affects only EXE files. What they do on that date is to display a "Ha ha" message and lock up, forcing you to cold boot. Moreover (at least in the EXE version), there is also a lockup, *without any message*, one hour after infection of memory on any day on which you use the default date of 1-1-80. The identifying strings are "APRIL 1ST", VIRUS" and "sURIV". (These viruses may actually be older than the above-described virus, but simply weren't noticed earlier since they extend files only once.) The author of the above-mentioned anti-viral software has now extended his programs to combat these two viruses as well. At present, he is concentrating his efforts on developing broad-spectrum programs, i.e. programs capable of detecting a wide variety of viruses. Yisrael Radai Computation Center Hebrew University of Jerusalem RADAI1@HBUNOS.BITNET ========================================================================= Date: 17 February 1988, 09:28:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Our new Republic of Letters (31 lines) Jean-Claude Guedon, a new HUMANIST, has sent me the following observation on our discussion group. A "beginner's mind," as a teacher of mine once used to say, is open to perceptions that experience and specialization tend to attenuate. So I'm grateful for his beginner's glimpse. "After sampling some of the discussions going on and looking at the various interests of the members, I am rather glad I am part of [HUMANIST]. In a sense, groups like the Humanist, based on efficient means of communication, rebuild a situation not unlike that of the old "Republic of Letters". The comparison appears even more convincing if we remember that many members of this informal republic were the equivalent of modern functionaries and could, therefore, take advantage of the mail systems developed for kings and princes. Our only challenge - and it is not a small one - is to be as good as they once were!" Jean-Claude Guedon Institut d'histoire et de Sociopolitique des sciences et Litterature comparee Universite de Montreal ========================================================================= Date: 17 February 1988, 09:40:02 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A new text-analysis package for MS-DOS (40 lines) The following is republished from another Canadian ListServ discussion group, ENGLISH. My thanks to Marshall Gilliland, the editor of that group, who is also a HUMANIST. -- WM -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From There is a review of a new program for DOS micros in the January issue of RESEARCH IN WORD PROCESSING NEWSLETTER, and it may interest some of you. The reviewer is Bryan Pfaffenberger, author of several books on personal computing. The program is TEXTPACK V, version 3.0, on four 5 1/4" floppies, from Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden, und Analysen e.V. Postfach 5969 D-6800 Mannheim-1, West Germany Cost: $60.00 (US), postpaid This is the micro version of a mainframe software package for content analysis. Pfaffenberger says in his summary that it "is probably the most powerful content analysis program available . . .[and is] a family of related text analysis programs that include procedures for generating simple word frequency analysis, creating key-word-in-context concordances, compiling indexes, and comparing the vocablularies of two texts. Although far from user-friendly in the Macintosh sense, Textpack's programs are well-conceived, fast, and powerful. The documentation is cryptic and dry, but a reasonably proficient PC user can manage it. Textpack V can, in sum, do just about everything that a literary scholar or political scientist would want to do with a computer-readable text. Academic computing centers take note: when the humanists and social scientitsts start knocking on your door and talking about text analysis, you'll do well to have a copy of the MS-DOS version of Textpack V around." M.G. ========================================================================= Date: 17 February 1988, 12:50:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Activities on HUMANIST, second report (449 lines) Dear Colleagues: Today HUMANIST has for the first time reached a (momentary) total of 200 listed members. Since 7 of these are actually redistribution lists, this numeriological fact is somewhat fuzzy. Nevertheless, an occasion to celebrate, if you need one. To mark the event I am circulating Lou Burnard's report on our online activites for about the last six months. It has been submitted to the Newsletter of the ACH. Yours, Willard McCarty HUMANIST So Far: A Report on Activities, August 1987 to January 1988 by Lou Burnard, Oxford University Computing Service This is the second in a series of reports on HUMANIST, the Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN discussion group for computing humanists that is sponsored jointly by the ACH, the ALLC and the University of Toronto's Centre for Computing in the Humanities. The first report, published in the ACH Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 1987) and circulated on HUMANIST itself, covered the initial two months. This one reviews the subsequent six months of strenuous activity. At the time of writing, participants in HUMANIST number nearly 180 and are spread across 11 countries (see table 1). Members are largely, but by no means exclusively, from North American academic computing centres. Table 2 shows that less than half of these participants actually create the messages that all, perforce, are assumed to read; out of over 600 messages during the last six months, nearly 500 were sent by just eight people, and out of 180 subscribers, 107 have never sent a message. In this, as in some other respects, HUMANIST resembles quite closely the sort of forum with which most of its members may be presumed to be most familiar: the academic committee. Personality traits familiar from that arena - the aggressive expert, the diffident enquirer, the unsuppressable bore - are equally well suited to this new medium: both young turks and old fogies are also to be found. Some of the rhetorical tricks and turn-taking rules appropriate to the oral medium find a new lease of life in the electronic one; indeed it is clear that this medium approximates more closely to orature than to literature. Its set phrases and jargon often betray an obsession with informal speech, and a desire to mimic it more *directly*, re-inventing typographic conventions for the purpose. As in conversation too, some topics will be seized upon while others, apparently equally promising, sink like stones at their first appearance; the wise HUMANIST, like the good conversationalist, learns to spot the right lull into which to launch a new topic. Perhaps because the interactions in an electronic dialogue are necessarily fewer and more spaced out (no pun intended) than those in face-to-face speech, misunderstanding and subsequent clarifications seem to occur more often than one might expect. However, the detailed functional analysis of electronic speech acts is an interesting but immense task, which I regretfully leave to discourse analysts better qualified than myself. (Needless to say, HUMANIST itself reported at least two such studies of "electronic paralanguage" during the period under review). For the purposes of this survey I identified four broad categories of message. In category A (for Administrative) go test messages, apologies for electronic disasters, announcements -but not discussion- of policy and a few related and oversized items such as the beginner's Guide to HUMANIST and the invaluable "Biographies". (On joining each member submits a brief biographical statement or essay; these are periodically gathered together and circulated to the membership.) Messages in category A totaled 57 messages, 18% of all messages, or 25% by bulk. In category C (for Conference) go announcements of all other kinds - calls for papers, job advertisements, conference reports, publicity for new software or facilities etc. The figures here totaled 39 messages, 12% of all messages, 20% of all lineage. As might be expected, categories A and C are disproportionately lengthy and not particularly frequent. I do not discuss them much further. In category Q (for query) go requests for information on specified topics, public answers to these, and summaries of such responses. These amounted to 20% of all messages but (again unsurprisingly) only 10% of all lines. I have been unable, as yet, to gather any statistics concerning the extent of private discussions occurring outside the main HUMANIST forum, though it is clear from those cases subsequently summarised that such discussions not only occur but are often very fruitful. What proportion of queries fall on stony ground is also hard, as yet, to determine. In category D (for discussion) I place those messages perhaps most typical of HUMANIST: general polemic, argument and disputation. Overall, these messages account for nearly 50% of the whole, (44% by line) and thus clearly dominate the network. With the curious exception of November, the relative proportions of D category messages remains more or less constant within each month. As table 5 shows, the relative proportions of other types of message are by no means constant over time. Of course, assigning a particular message to some category is not always a clear-cut matter. Correspondents occasionally combine a number of topics - or kinds of topic - in a single message. Moreover, the medium itself is still somewhat unreliable. Internal evidence shows that not all messages always get through to all recipients, nor do they always arrive in the order in which they were despatched or (presumably) composed. This report is based only on the messages which actually reached me here in Oxford; concerning the rest I remain (on sound Wittgensteinian principles) silent. I am equally silent on messages in categories A and C above, which are of purely transient interest. Space precludes anything more than a simple indication of the range of topics on which HUMANISTs have sought (and often obtained) guidance. In category Q over the last six months I found messages asking for information on typesetters with a PostScript interface, on scanners capable of dealing with microform, about all sorts of different machine readable texts and about software for ESL teaching, for library cataloguing, for checking spelling, for browsing foreign language texts, and for word processing in Sanskrit. HUMANISTs asked for electronic mail addresses in Greece and in Australia, for concordance packages for the Macintosh and the Amiga ST, for address lists and bibliographies; they wondered who had used the programming language Icon and whether image processing could be used to analyse corrupt manuscripts; they asked for details of the organisational structure of humanities computing centres and of the standards for cataloguing of computer media. Above all however, HUMANISTs argue. Back in August 1987 HUMANIST was only a few months old, yet many issues which have since become familiar to its readership were already on the agenda. Where exactly are the humanities as a discipline? what is their relation to science and technology? Correspondents referred to the infamous "Two cultures" debate of the late fifties, somehow now more relevant to the kind of "cross-disciplinary soup we are cooking", but rather than re-flaying that particular dead horse, the discussion moved rapidly to another recurrent worry: did the introduction of computing change humanistic scholarship quantitatively or qualitatively? Does electronic mail differ only in scale and effectiveness from the runner with the cleft stick? Do computers merely provide better tools to do tasks we have always wanted to do? The opinion of one correspondent ("if computers weren't around, I doubt very much if many of the ways we think about texts would have come to be") provoked another into demanding (reasonably enough) evidence. Such evidence as was forthcoming, however, did concede the point that "it could all be done without computers in some theoretical sense, but certainly not as quickly". Reference was made to a forthcoming collection of essays which might settle whether or not it was chimerical to hope that computers will somehow assist not just in marshaling the evidence but in providing interpretations of it. A second leitmotiv of HUMANIST discussions was first heard towards the end of August, when an enquiry about the availability of some texts in machine readable form provoked an assertion of the moral responsibility the preparers of such texts should accept for making their existence well known and preferably for depositing them in a Text Archive for the benefit of all. A note of caution concerning copyright was also first sounded here, and it was suggested that those responsible for new editions should always attempt to retain control over the rights to electronic distribution of their material. With the start of the new academic year, HUMANIST became more dominated by specific enquiries, and a comparatively low key wrangle about whether or not product announcements, software reviews and the like should be allowed to sully its airspace. Characteristically, this also provided the occasion for some HUMANISTs to engage in an amusing socio-linguistic discussion of the phenomenon known as "flaming", while others plaintively asked for "less chatter about the computer which is only a tool and more about what we are using it for". It appeared that some far flung HUMANISTs actually have to pay money proportionate to the size of the mailings they accept, recalling an earlier remark about the uniquely privileged nature of the bulk of those enjoying the delights of this new time-waster, which was (as one European put it) "surely *founded* for chatter". In mid October, a fairly pedestrian discussion about the general lack of recognition for computational activities and publications suddenly took off with the re-emergence of the copyright problems referred to above. If electronic publication was on a par with paper publication, surely the same principles of ownership and due regard for scholarly labours applied to it? But did this not mitigate against the current easy camaraderie with which articles, gossip and notes are transferred from one medium to another? as indeed are those more substantial fruits of electronic labours, such as machine readable texts? For one correspondent such activities, without explicit permission, were "a measure of the anesthetizing effect of the xerox machine on our moral sense". For another, however "asking concedes the other party's right to refuse". In mid-November, after a particularly rebarbative electronic foul up, minimal editorial supervision of all HUMANIST submissions was initiated. Other than some discussion of the "conversational style" appropriate to the network, this appears to have had little or no inhibitory effect on either the scale or the manner of subsequent contributions. An enquiry about the availability of some Akkadian texts led to a repeated assertion of the importance to scholarship of reliable machine readable texts. Conventional publishers were widely castigated for their short-sighted unwillingness to make such materials available (being compared on one occasion to mediaeval monks using manuscripts for candles, and on another to renaissance printers throwing away Carolingian manuscripts once they had been set in type). HUMANISTs were exhorted to exert peer pressure on publishers, to pool their expertise in the definition of standards, to work together for the establishment of a consortium of centres which could offer archival facilities and define standards. More realistically perhaps, some HUMANISTs remarked that publishers were unlikely to respond to idealistic pressures and that a network of libraries and data archives already existed which could do all of the required tasks and more were it sufficiently motivated and directed. At present, said one, all we have is "a poor man's archive" dependent on voluntary support. Others were more optimistic about the possibility of founding a "North American text Archive and Service Center" and less optimistic about the wisdom of leaving such affairs to the laws of the marketplace. One intriguing proposal was that a national or international Archive might be managed as a giant distributed database. Following the highly successful Vassar conference on text encoding standards in mid November, a long series of contributions addressed the issue of how texts should be encoded for deposit in (or issue from) such an archive. No one seems to have seriously dissented from the view that descriptive rather than procedural markup was desirable, nor to have proposed any method to describe such markup other than SGML, so that it is a little hard to see quite what all the fuss was about - unless it was necessary to combat the apathy of long established practise. One controversy which did emerge concerned the desirability (or feasibility) of enforcing a minimal encoding system, and the extent to which this was a fit role for an archive to take on. "Trying to save the past is just going to retard development" argued one, while another lone voice asserted a "rage for chaos" and praised "polymorphic encoding" on the grounds that all encoding systems were inherently subjective ("Every decoding is another encoding" to quote Morris Zapp). Anxiety was expressed about the dangers of bureaucracy. Both views were, to the middle ground at least, equally misconceived. In the first case, no-one was proposing that past errors should dictate future standards, but only that safeguarding what had been achieved was a different activity from proposing what should be done in the future. In the second case, no-one wished to fetter (or to "Prussianize") scholarly ingenuity, only to define a common language for its expression. There was also much support for the commonsense view that conversion of an existing text to an adequate level of markup up was generally much less work than starting from scratch. Clearly, however, a lot depends on what is meant by "generally" and by "adequate": for one HUMANIST an adequate markup was one from which the "original form of a document" could be re-created, thus rather begging the question of how that "original form" was to be defined. To insist on such a distinction between "objective text" and "subjective commentary" is "to miss the point of literary criticism altogether" as another put it. One technical problem with SGML which was identified, though not much discussed, was its awkwardness at handling multiply hierarchical structures within a single document; one straw man which was repeatedly shot down was the apparent verbosity of most current implementations using it. However, as one correspondent pointed out, the SGML standard existed and was not going to disappear. It was up to HUMANISTs to make the best use of it by proposing tag sets appropriate to their needs, perhaps using some sort of data dictionary to help in this task. At the end of 1987 it seemed that "text markup and encoding have turned out to be THE issue for HUMANISTs to get productively excited about". Yet the new year saw an entirely new topic sweep all others aside. A discussion on the styles of software most appropriate for humanistic research soon focused on an energetic debate about the potentials of hypertext systems. It was clear to some that the text-analysis feature of existing software systems were primitive and the tasks they facilitated "critically naive". Would hypertext systems, in which discrete units of text, graphics etc. are tightly coupled to form an arbitrarily complex network, offer any improvement on sequential searching, database construction, concordancing visible tokens and so forth? Participations in this discussion ranged more widely than usual between the evangelical and the ill-informed, so that rather more heat than light was generated on the topic of what was distinctively new about hypertext, but several useful points and an excellent bibliography did emerge. A hypertext system, it was agreed, did extend the range of what was possible with a computer (provided you could find one powerful enough to run it), though whether or not its facilities were fundamentally new remained a moot (and familiar) point. It also seemed (to this reader at least) that the fundamental notion of hypertext derived from somewhat primitive view of the way human reasoning proceeds. The hypertext paradigm does not regard as primitive such mental activities as aggregation or categorisation (this X is a sort of Y) or semantic relationships (all Xs are potentially Yd to that Z), which lie at the root of the way most current database systems are designed. Nevertheless it clearly offers exciting possibilities - certainly more exciting (in one HUMANIST's memorable phrase) than "the discovery of the dung beetle entering my apartment". Considerations about the absence of software for analysing the place of individual texts within a larger cultural context lead some HUMANISTs to ponder the rules determining the existence of software of any particular type. Was there perhaps some necessary connexion between the facilities offered by current software systems and current critical dogma? One respondent favoured a simpler explanation: "Straightforward concordance programs are trivial in comparison to dbms and I think that explains the situation much better than does the theory of predominant literary schools". It seems as if HUMANISTs get not just "the archives they deserve" but the software that's easiest to write. -----------Tables for the Humanist Digest------------------------ Table 1 : Humanist Subscribers by Country |Country of |Total number |Number of re- | origin |of sub's |distribution | |per country |lists incl. | |--------------------------|------------| |? | 2| 0| Note: Each "redistribution |Belgium | 3| 0| list" appears as one |Canada | 54| 1| member of HUMANIST but |Eire | 1| 0| stands for a number of |France | 1| 0| people. These are passive |Israel | 4| 0| members, i.e., they only |Italy | 1| 0| receive messages. The number |Netherlands | 1| 0| of such members are not |Norway | 3| 0| known to the compiler of |UK | 37| 4| this report & so do not |USA | 73| 2| figure in these tables. |--------------------------|------------| Total 180 7 Table 1a. Subscribers per node |nusers |nsuch | |---------------------------| | 1| 70| | 2| 17| | 3| 11| | 4| 2| | 5| 1| | 7| 1| | 8| 1| | 13| 1| |---------------------------- Table 2. Messages sent per subscriber |n_mess_sent |number_such |messages | |-----------------------------------------| | 0| 107| 0| | 1| 31| 31| | 2| 10| 20| | 3| 9| 27| | 4| 3| 12| | 5| 2| 10| | 6| 3| 18| | 7| 3| 21| | 8| 2| 16| | 10| 1| 10| | 12| 1| 12| | 14| 1| 14| | 17| 1| 17| | 18| 1| 18| | 20| 1| 20| | 71| 1| 71| |-----------------------------------------| Totals 177| 316| ------------------------------------------- Table 3 Messages by origin |country |Total message| |--------------------------| |? | 8| |Canada | 130| |Israel | 6| |UK | 40| |USA | 132| |--------------------------| Table 4: Messages by type |tag |messages |% messages|linecount |%lines | |--------------------------------------------------------| |A | 57| 17.981| 3867| 25.306| |C | 39| 12.303| 3078| 20.143| |D | 156| 49.211| 6707| 43.891| |Q | 64| 20.189| 1616| 10.575| |--------------------------------------------------------| Table 5: Messages by type within each month |type |messages |% in month|lines |% in month| ---------------------------------------------------------------| AUG87 |A | 10| 23.256| 1230| 32.031| SEP87 |A | 7| 17.500| 105| 9.722| OCT87 |A | 9| 30.000| 428| 36.992| NOV87 |A | 16| 34.783| 863| 48.840| DEC87 |A | 10| 11.494| 1178| 25.732| JAN88 |A | 2| 4.000| 5| 0.256| AUG87 |C | 3| 6.977| 1712| 44.583| SEP87 |C | 6| 15.000| 208| 19.259| OCT87 |C | 1| 3.333| 93| 8.038| NOV87 |C | 13| 28.261| 526| 29.768| DEC87 |C | 6| 6.897| 218| 4.762| JAN88 |C | 6| 12.000| 112| 5.744| AUG87 |D | 22| 51.163| 694| 18.073| SEP87 |D | 17| 42.500| 577| 53.426| OCT87 |D | 13| 43.333| 518| 44.771| NOV87 |D | 4| 8.696| 131| 7.414| DEC87 |D | 52| 59.770| 2649| 57.864| JAN88 |D | 37| 74.000| 1678| 86.051| AUG87 |Q | 8| 18.605| 204| 5.313| SEP87 |Q | 10| 25.000| 190| 17.593| OCT87 |Q | 7| 23.333| 118| 10.199| NOV87 |Q | 13| 28.261| 247| 13.978| DEC87 |Q | 18| 20.690| 520| 11.359| JAN88 |Q | 5| 10.000| 155| 7.949| ---------------------------------------------------------------| *****END***** ========================================================================= Date: 17 February 1988, 22:53:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Lou unkindly cut off when peeked under VM/CMS (22 lines) As more than one person has complained to me today, Lou Burnard's report on HUMANIST when PEEKed in the reader of an IBM VM/CMS system appears to be unkindly cut off in mid stride. Actually the whole thing has arrived, but one "feature" of PEEK is that by default it will show only the first x lines of a long file. To read the whole thing you should first RECEIVE it. Then you can read it with XEDIT, or download it and print it out. I suggest the latter, since I find it a pleasure to read, and I find such pleasures hard to sustain on screen. Perhaps that's just a sign of age, however. Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 18 February 1988, 10:28:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs, on-line dictionaries, and NLP (32 lines) ---------------------------- From Joe Giampapa I would like to direct this message to all people who use CD-ROMs, on-line dictionaries, or are familiar with natural language processing (NLP). I am trying to do research in NLP, but am frequently confronted by the stark reality that my programs (as well as those of others) are merely "toys" without an on-line dictionary. Is there anybody out there who has had this problem and has managed to get around it on a modest budget and hardware configuration (ie. <=$2k, <10Meg, on a VAX 8650, or Symbolics Lisp Machine{_)? The "solution" I came up with was using a CD-ROM dictionary (like MicroSoft's Bookshelf), paired with a database of linguistic information for lexical items (ie. subcategorization) on the hard disk. However, I still have not seen one working CD-ROM dictionary, wonder how their addressing works, and how feasible my idea is. I would appreciate any insight into my dilemma, and references of people (or departments) to contact who are doing similar work. Thank you in advance. Joe Giampapa giampapa@brandeis.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 18 February 1988, 19:33:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Contact ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen Does anyone know if the Centre for Research in Education, University of East Anglia, can be reached via BITNET or other e-mail system? Thanks, Mark ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 00:00:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hyper text and Stephen Reimer's note (28 lines) ---------------------------- From Jean-Claude Guedon Stephen Reimer asked us whether Ted Nelson was sane or misrepresented by Byte Magazine. I do not think the question is very interesting in itself, but it is significant of the way in which ideas are staged (not to say m marketed) nowadays. It reminds me of the way the term "postmodernism" was bandied about in a conference I attended last November. This said, it would be useful to examine what is really new in the expression "hypertext". To me, hypertext is quite old. Pascal may have done a good example of it in his "Pensees". Diderot certainly implemented a form of hypertext in the Encyclopedie when he injected "renvois" to various articles at different places within an article, thus allowing the reader to "drift" according to the inclinations of his thought. Indeed, it would be fun to store the Encylopedie in hypertext mode on CD-ROM with electronic referrals following the indications of the original volumes. Anybody interested in pursuing the idea (and finding the financing to do it). Best to all. Jean-Claude Guedon (Guedon@umtlvr.bitnet) ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 00:04:12 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hypertext, on-line dictionaries (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Randall Smith <6500rms@UCSBUXB.BITNET> This is partly in response to Joe Giampapa's question about on- line dictionaries for natural language processing and partly a description of a hypertext system which HUMANISTS may be interested in knowing about. Greg Crane at the Harvard University Classics Department is working on a model Greek hypertext system called "Perseus." This model, when complete, will have a Greek text linked to an _apparatus criticus_, dictionary, grammar, metrical scansion, and commentary for teaching purposes. As far as I know this work is being done using Lightspeed C on a Macintosh (probably a Mac II). One of the things it will incorporate is an on-line version of the intermediate Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon. I know that he just received the electronic version of this lexicon, though I have no idea how it is stored, indexed, etc. Also, he is using a program written by Neal Smith at Cincinnati which does morphological parsing of Greek words. Even though this does not directly involve natural language processing, some of the techniques which Greg is using may be helpful. He can be reached at: Department of Classics 319 Boylston Hall Harvard University Randall Smith ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 11:54:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: References for SGML wanted (16 lines) ---------------------------- From Leslie Burkholder During the course of the many exchanges on SGML, someone posted some references to introductions to SGML. Could that person, or someone else, send me these references? Thanks. lb0q@andrew.cmu.edu ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 11:55:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Lou Burnard's article (30 lines) ---------------------------- From PRUSSELL%OCVAXA@CMCCVB I have some observations to make on Lou Burnard's article that I suspect are not unique to my experience. In the article, he alludes to the "private discussions occurring outside the main HUMANIST forum." I have not (until now) contributed to the main HUMANIST forum. I have, however, joined a special interest group (IBYCUS); sent information to and received help from individual members, institutions, and programs; and re-established communication with long lost colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. HUMANIST has also served as a real-time example in faculty seminars I give on computer networks. HUMANIST's value to me may not be reflected in Lou's impressive statistics, but it goes far beyond the discussions carried on amongst the "top seven." Roberta Russell Oberlin College ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 11:59:11 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Asides, private discussions, and undocumented uses of HUMANIST I for one would be very interested to hear from people who, like Roberta Russell, have used HUMANIST in ways that do not show up in the public forum. I wonder if the membership would not very much enjoy a report now and then about what HUMANIST has provoked or assisted offline? Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 13:19:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML reference (28 lines) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) I came across what appears to be an excellent introduction to SGML in the Univ. of Texas at Austin library earlier this week. It is: SGML and Related Issues by Joan Margaret Smith,1986. It is a British National Bibliography Research Fund Report available from: (1) The British Library Publications Sales Unit, Boston Spa, Wetherby, West Yorkshire, LS23 7BQ, UK or (2) Longwood Publishing Group, Inc., 51 Washington Street Dover, New Hampshire, 03820, USA It had both an ISBN number (0-7123-3082-8) and an ISSN number (0264-2972;22) It was a report on the events leading up to the creation of the ISO SGML standard and seemed quite readable. I don't know what the price is. ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 14:23:57 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: An undocumented use of HUMANIST (23 lines) ---------------------------- From Lou Burnard One of the many which I failed to find space for in my recent account was the case of a colleague of mine who, having occasion to visit New York at a particular crucial point during some electronic discussions on JANET, was provided by HUMANIST with an introduction to a BITNET site in NY from which he could continue his negotiations. On the offchance, he sent four pleas for help in the morning and received 3 offers of a temporary BITNET account the same day. New Yorkers are of course famous for their hospitality, but this was beyond the call of duty. It's also worth bearing in mind the next time people start droning on about the dehumanising effect of the computer on personal interaction! Lou ========================================================================= Date: 19 February 1988, 18:34:09 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML (me too!) ---------------------------- From Francois-Michel Lang I too would be greatly interested in some introductory references to SGML. If somebody out there (Bob Amsler?) could send them to me too, I'd be very grateful. Thanks. --Francois Lang Francois-Michel Lang Paoli Research Center, Unisys Corporation lang@prc.unisys.com (215) 648-7469 Dept of Comp & Info Science, U of PA lang@cis.upenn.edu (215) 898-9511 ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 01:52:36 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Reference on SGML tags for literary documents (20 lines) ---------------------------- From Peter Roosen-Runge I recently came across a Master's Thesis which gave me a good introduction to the key ideas of SGML and what's involved in applying them to the creation of a set of tags for literary documents. An implementation in SCRIPT/VS is discussed, there's a 90-page reference manual as an appendix which gives a clear description of all the elements defined in the "standard" proposed by the author, and she's provided a sample markup and formatted output for a scene from Hamlet. This is rather outside my field, so I can't assess how complete or useful the proposed set of tags would be, but I found the thesis a great help in understanding the recent HUMANIST discussion of SGML issues. The thesis is from 1986 but was recently published as a technical report: Fraser, Cheryl, A. An Encoding Standard for Literary Documents External Technical Report ISSN-0836-0227-88-207 Department of Computing & Information Science, Queen's University: January 1988 ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 12:28:52 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs, Hypertext, and GUIDE (43 lines) ---------------------------- From Ken Tompkins I note that the same sort of intensity and conviction has pervaded the discussion of CD-ROMS that was involved in the remarks on Hypertext. Here, we are just in the early stages of considering wider purchases of CD-ROM technology -- we have a modest application in our library accessing the READER'S GUIDE. The various questions posed by readers asking if faculty will use the technology to such an extent that wide purchase can be justified seem terribly important. I suspect that we will recommend an area in our library where various CD-ROM disks will be stored for faculty and student access. I doubt the College will support individual purchases. A recent piece in PC-WEEK suggests that there may still be life in magnetic media. At IBM's Almaden Lab in San Jose, scientists discovered that a 3 1/2 inch disk could store 10 gigabytes. The only limits found in the project was in recording head technology. Clearly, optical disk technology offers substantial benefits -- stability, etc. but it seems equally clear that magnetic media cannot be so easily counted out. One final question. Are any readers experimenting with GUIDE a hypertext application for PC-AT's? I bought a copy a week ago and am rather impressed with its pedagogical possibilities. To learn how to use it, I'm developing a set of files on a Shakespearean sonnet. Do other readers have practical experiences with the program. If so, I'd like to hear about them. Ken Tompkins Stockton State College ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 12:33:08 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Tenure-track job in electronic publishing & literature (62 ll.) ---------------------------- From Ken Tompkins The following position is now open; if you know of anyone fitting the description who would like to develop an Electronic Publishing Track from the ground up, PLEASE HAVE THEM RESPOND to the address below. Also please note my request at the bottom. ************* Faculty Position Open ************** The Literature and Language Program (Department) of Stockton State College seeks an Instructor or Assistant Professor of Applied Communications for a renewable tenure track position starting September 1, 1988. The candidate should have a Ph.D or ABD (for Instructor) in the appropriate field. Curricular expertise plus experience in the field of Electronic/Desktop Publishing or related area required. College level teaching experience strongly preferred. Literature specialization may be British, American, or non-Western. The function of this position is to develop an Applied Communications concentration emphasizing Electronic Publishing and/or Publication Design within the Literature and Language Program. Current salary range: $20,713 -- $28,956 depending on qualifications and experience plus State mandated fringe benefits. Screening begins February 1, 1988. Send letter of application with CV and direct three letters of reference to: Margaret Marsh Chair, Faculty of Arts and Humanities Stockton State College Pomona, N.J. 08240 AA/EOE Employer -- Minorities and Women encouraged to apply. ********************************** My request: We have advertised this position in the major listings applicable to the Literature component but so far have received no responses. Can members of HUMANIST suggest other outlets more oriented to the electronic publishing component? If you can please reply directly to me. This is an opportunity to teach literature and to develop a college-wide facility for electronic publishing as well as to establish a concentration for students. ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 13:13:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Amendment to Ken Tompkin's item (28 lines) ---------------------------- From David Nash >From Ken Tompkins [...] A recent piece in PC-WEEK suggests that there may still be life in magnetic media. At IBM's Almaden Lab in San Jose, scientists discovered that a 3 1/2 inch disk could store 10 gigabytes. The only limits found in the project was in recording head technology. February 1988 BYTE (page 11) reports what must be the same story, but have it that the 3.5" disks can hold "10 gigabits". This would be a factor of 8, I guess, less than 10 gigabytes, and really to be compared to the ca. 1 gigabyte hard disks on the market now. "Several industry watchers said they'll get more excited when they see devices that can read those disks..." -DGN ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 15:01:32 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Why CD-ROM? (24 lines) ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen The excitment over CD-ROM is in the first two letters. It is a technology that is in place, with existing and rapidly expanding production facilities, and -- if audio CD is any example -- the prospect of rapid decending prices. Standards in the computing business, as in many others, has less to do with technical excellence as with economic and marketing considerations. You can go out right now and buy 500 meg HD, but this will always be a limited market (read expensive) item. The CD has the benefit of economy of scale that will probably not be rivaled by specialized magnetic media. The IBM-PC standard is a lasting tribute to the power of economics and marketing to ignore technical advances and to retard future technical developments. Mark ========================================================================= Date: 20 February 1988, 16:36:54 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Parsing programs (37 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz I'm interested in working up a parsing engine geared for the Hebrew Old Testa- ment. Can anyone recommend any relevant articles? This really isn't a query about machine translation, as I am only interested in distinguishing various grammatical categories. It isn't even about machine-assisted translation. My reason for wanting to do this is that I am interested in doing grammatical searches of various sorts on the Old Testament text. Probably articles on Arabic or other Semitic languages will be applicable. I don't know. Maybe someone out there *does*. NB: I am not interested in analyzed or lemmatized texts, since this would cause me to lose a lot of flexibility. Every time my notion of a grammatical category changed, I'd need to mark everything over again. Fully analyzed text actually makes parsing more a matter for the editor of the text than the author of the parsing program! -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer P.S. Most of what I have done so far is in Icon. But if anyone wants to send sample code, please feel free to do so. I don't mind reading C, SNOBOL4, or some PASCAL (though Icon is definitely my home-field). ========================================================================= Date: 21 February 1988, 11:01:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Silent use of HUMANIST (30 lines) ---------------------------- From R.J.Hare@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Like Roberta Russell, I too have used HUMANIST as an example of the intelligent use of computers to disseminate information, etc. in a series of seminars we give at Edinburgh to the annual intake of English Literature post-graduates. HUMANIST is an impressive example of such usage, and the only way I intend to change this type of usage in the future is to increase the range of people we demonstrate it to. Roger Hare. ========================================================================= Date: 21 February 1988, 11:04:14 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Parsing engine for Hebrew (49 lines) ---------------------------- From Robin C. Cover In response to the inquiry of Richard Goerwitz on parsing engines for Hebrew: I am also interested, but the last time I investigated this topic I found disappointingly little information. We should ask the Israelis, I'm sure, and in particular Yaacov Choueka. An important question is whether we want a parser WITH a dictionary or WITHOUT a dictionary; the latter, I'm afraid, would be one big program. Some progress has been made on Greek parsers (Gregory Crane, Harvard; Neel Smith, Bowdoin College; Tony Smith, Manchester) but apparently not for Hebrew. If other HUMANISTS have better news, I'm all ears. One possibility would be to check with Gerard Weil. A student of his once wrote a dissertation on parsing Hebrew by computer, but to my knowledge it was not perfected (Moshe Azar, "Analyse Morphologique Automatique du Texte Hebreu de la Bible," 2 volumes; Nancy 1970). A more profitable lead might be to ask Yaacov Choueka, whose work on lemmatization and disambiguation is highly regarded, and is implemented (I understand) in the software of the Responsa Project, where much of this mammoth corpus of Hebrew is parsed on the fly; see J.J. Hughes in _Bits and Bytes Review_ 1/7 (June, 1987) 7-12. (Also, bibliography in Y. Choueka, "Disambiguation by Short Contexts," _CHum 19 (1985) 147-157.) But I doubt that this is portable or obtainable code. I suspect you want a completely rule-based parser, working with a grammar but not a dictionary. If you don't mind a little help from a dictionary, see Walter Claassen's article "Towards a Morphological Analysis of Biblical Hebrew:a semi-automatic approach," in the proceedings of the Louvain conference, _Bible et Informatique: Le Texte_ (1986), pp. 143-54. But I suspect you should be asking this to the ACM group, not on HUMANIST. I also wish there WAS more interaction between computational linguists and those (HUMANISTS) who generally work as literary critics. There is bibliography on this topic in the volume published by the CIB in 1981, _Centre: Informatique et Bible_ (Brepols, 1981); cf pp. 105-106 on morphological analysis, and pp. 138-140 on lemmatization by computer. Professor Robin C. Cover ZRCC1001@SMUVM1.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 21 February 1988, 18:33:02 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Bitnet/EARN connection to Univ. of East Anglia (32 lines) ---------------------------- From Ian Lambert I picked up a message during the last 3 days from someone wanting to know of the Centre for Research in Education at the University of East Anglia. Specifically they were seeking a BITNET or EARN connection. I logged into our database of hosts here in Canterbury and found only the two references to UEA, and thought that this at least would give our colleague HUMANIST a contact to work from. The numbers are the numerical ids. We have alpha ids here but I am aware that the majority of them are UKC specific, and therefore unlikely to work outside our internal network. The only links we have to the University of East Anglia apparently are: 000008006002 their central VAX; and 000008006003 the Computer Centre Perhaps their postman can help. Ian ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 09:10:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Icon (52 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz It occurs to me that there are probably a few people reading Humanist mailings who run all kinds of programs, and yet do not program themselves. For those who would like to, there is an easy way - learn Icon. Icon is a very high-level, general-purpose programming language that shines when put to text and string-handling tasks. Fortunately, it is also a modern "structured" language, so unlike BASIC, FORTRAN, SNOBOL, etc., it *forces* the programmer into a more structured, procedurally-oriented approach. For me Icon served as an excellent starting point. Before this, I had learned a little assembler (80x86 and some BASIC), but had not really been able to lauch into more substantial programming tasks. Though Icon has a very rich and complex syntax, one can master its basic features in two or three weeks. Just a few lines of Icon code, moreover, can do what would take many lines of, say, Pascal or C (especially with no string handling facilities). Almost as soon as one begins writing Icon programs, one begins writing useful and even very powerful programs. After learning Icon, one can then move into lower-level languages. It's a little hard to get used to having to tell the compiler how much storage to allot every variable (i.e. to operate without "garbage collection") but overall, it seems much easier to begin programming in C after Icon than before. I know because I tried. C seemed incredibly cryptic when I had my first run at it, and I gave up. I guess after learning basic techniques with Icon, it all fell into place. I say this not because I'm connected with the creators of Icon in any way. I just wanted to offer a little information that might be useful to those who feel walled off from their machines because of their inability to pro- gram it themselves - either at all, or in a language suitable to the sorts of tasks they want to perform. For the interested, Icon is free (!). Send a note to the Icon project at icon-project@arizona.edu. There's also a book out called *The Icon Programming Language* by Ralph and Madge Griswold (Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 1983). -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 09:16:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: East Anglia successfully reached by Arizona (15 lines) ---------------------------- From John Roper From John Roper (S200@cpc865.uea.ac.uk) Just to let everybody know that Mark Olsen successfully contacted University of East Anglia. There is obviously a lot of activity behind the scenes if that request was any guide. ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 09:48:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Assessment of the Oxford Text Archive (39 lines) ---------------------------- From Judith Proud Lou Burnard's recent requests for ideas and opinions concerning various aspects of the Text Archive and its catalogue (Humanist 9th Dec, 8th Feb and passim) are not (necessarily) an early indication of mid-life crisis, mounting self-doubt or basic insecurity but largely the result of recent funding granted by the British Library to enable an assessment of the past workings and current status of the Oxford Text Archive and the formulation of a realistic policy for its future. This funding has led to my appointment to the project for the period of one year at the end of which I shall be producing a report containing our various findings and recommendations. As Lou has already started to do, with somewhat disappointing results, we would like during the course of the project to throw out a number of general requests for information, opinions and ideas from Humanists who have used the Archive in the past or decided not to use it for particular reasons. Just as important for our research, however, and perhaps of more general interest to most Humanists, are the broader issues involved in the use of Text Archives, a vast area that includes a number of topics that have already been touched on in earlier Humanist discussions and which we hope will continue to be discussed energetically and productively. This is just a preliminary announcement to introduce you to the project, but any initial thoughts or comments would of course be very welcome. Judith Proud Oxford Text Archive ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 13:20:55 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Thanks and some comments on ICON (31 lines) ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen First, let me thank all those who offered help in contacting East Anglia -- I received no less than 7 messages, showing that we are a humane lot. Richard Goerwitz's comments on Icon are interesting, for what he says and what he does not say. Icon is a sophisticated string processing language that is a marked improvement on SNOBOL and certainly easier to use for many applications than either C or BASIC. But Goerwitz treats it as a "learning" language rather than as a serious application language. Inspite of my positive evaluation of Icon, I too have looked at it and used it in only limited applications. This is because the PD implementation does not have a number of important features that are necessary for serious programming, such as random disk access and a decent debugger, not to mention the combined editor/compilers like Turbo Pascal. The basic components of the language, as defined by Griswold and his group, are admirable, but will probably not see very wide use until a software house picks up the language and gives it higher levels of support. Mark ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 13:23:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hebrew parsing programs (34 lines) ---------------------------- From John Gleason The Packard Humanities Institute is currently involved in correcting an automated morphological analysis of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The original automated analysis was done by: Richard E. Whitaker 300 Broadway Pella, IA 50219 (515) 628-4360 I believe Whitaker did the analysis on an Ibycus system, but I don't know if it was the mini or the micro. He's a knowledgeable Semiticist, and can also give you lots more information than I can on what's being done in this area. The correction of the automated analysis is being done by: J. Alan Groves Westminster Theological Seminary Box 27009 Philadelphia, PA 19118 (215) 572-3808 ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 13:26:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hebrew Bible parsing (58 lines) ---------------------------- From Bob Kraft A couple of footnotes to the informative reply by Robin Cover to Richard Goerwitz' query about Hebrew Bible parsing. I will admit that I'm not sure why it wouldn't be suitable to start with "analyzed or lemmatized texts" from which a lot of flexibility could easily be constructed, but I will leave that for Richard and Robin to enlighten me. My footnotes do in fact refer primarily to analyzed text. Sorry. But they are part of the broader discussion. (1) Several "morphological analyzed" forms of the Hebrew Bible exist in various stages of verification and availability. Two that we at CCAT were unable to obtain for use in the Septuagint Project (CATSS) are by the late Gerard Weil and his French team, and by Francis Andersen and Dean Forbes in Australia. Early in the game, the results from the Maredsous (Belgium) project were also unavailable, so we commissioned Richard Whitaker to create programs for automatic analysis on the older IBYCUS System in the IBYX language (similar to C). As we made progress on this project, negotiations with the Maredsous project became more favorable, so now the results from the Whitaker programs and from Maredsous are being collated and corrected/verified as necessary by the Westminster Seminary team under Alan Groves. Our desire is to make this material avaialble for scholarly research, and if there is some way that Whitaker's code could be of help, I am willing to investigate the question further along those lines. I know nothing beyond what Robin communicated about the other players in this game, except that Dean Forbes did the programming for the Andersen analysis and could be approached about his code as well. (2) The discussion of Greek analysis programs should make note of the pioneering efforts of David Packard, whose morphological analysis program written for IBM maniframes has been around for a very long time and is described in an article from one of the Linguistic Computing conferences at Pisa. This program is mounted in various centers, the most recent of which is Manchester (Robin referred to Tony Smith there), which has permission to serve as a center for others to access the program electronically. (3) Analysis programs for other languages also exist, and are sometimes available in one way or another. We were able to obtain DeLatte's Latin program (Liege) for use on projects through CCAT, and doubtless others have developed or obtained similar programs. Perhaps HUMANIST would be a good place to create an inventory of information on such matters, for accessing through the fileserver? Bob Kraft (CCAT) ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 14:21:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: XT vs. Mac (31 lines) ---------------------------- From Maurice Charland I have a modest sum to spend on microcomputers for our PhD program in Communication. My university supports PC-style machines, but does not support Macs. Also, current XT-clone prices are such that they come in approx. $1000 less than Macs. Given this, are there compelling arguments that would favour purchasing Macs? The machines will be used by PhD students and faculty. With the exception of word processing, the possible applications of these machines is undetermined. I do not, in the near future, expect much in the way of computer-based textual analysis (a hot topic currently on HUMANIST). While I gather that, in the abstract, Apple's designs are far better than IBM's I do wonder whether this difference makes a difference for most applications in the social sciences and humanities. What do fellow HUMANISTS think. Thanks, Maurice Charland Communication Studies Concordia University ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 14:23:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Using the KDEM 4000 for non-Roman alphabets (55 lines) ---------------------------- From Robin C. Cover I would like to accumulate some wisdom on the use of the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine (KDEM 4000) for digitizing complex textual materials, especially non-roman scripts. We recently acquired a KDEM 4000, but found the documentation somewhat spartan, and the support personnel (including engineers) have been less than enthusiastic about supplying additional information. By trial-and-error, we have learned some tricks that allow us to tweak performance for tasks that press the scanner to its limits, and perhaps into service for which it was not designed. But I suspect there are rich storehouses of "departmental lore" held at various universities where the KDEM has been used in precisely this way. It would be helpful to know, if we can find out, exactly what kind of intelligence the KDEM 4000 has, how it operates (at the algorithmic level), how its performance can be optimized for scanning multiple-font materials. I will appreciate cooperation from any institutions who would be willing to contribute to this task: documenting undocumented features of optimal KDEM performance. Perhaps veteran operators could be asked to contribute a paragraph or two, or suggestions in list format, describing their most critical discoveries in working with the KDEM. I will be glad to compile these suggestions for redistribution if they are sent to me personally, but I would also like to know via public postings if HUMANISTS at other KDEM sites think this is a worthwhile enterprise. Maybe the KDEM 4000 is "just as smart (or stupid) as it is, and not much more can be said." Finally, does anyone know whether OCR technology is currently being developed by major companies? I understand that Palantir is increasing the sophistication of its scanners by adding more font libraries (including foreign language fonts), but this is hardly a godsend for our applications. Much optical scanning technology (as with Recognition Corporation) seems to be focused on bit-mapped images and sophisticated compression algorithms for mass storage, but with less emphasis upon character recognition per se. I'd be delighted to hear that some kind of commercial application is driving development of *intelligent* optical character recognition devices. Wouldn't libraries want this technology? Professor Robin C. Cover ZRCC1001@SMUVM1.bitnet 3909 Swiss Avenue Dallas, TX 75204 (214) 296-1783 ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 18:59:20 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Teaching with hypertext/media conference (45 lines) ---------------------------- From elli@husc6.BITNET (Elli Mylonas) I am posting this for a friend. Please pass it on to local bulletin boards, and to others who may be interested. --Elli Mylonas CALL FOR PAPERS Conference: "Teaching with Hypertext," August 8-9, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. It has long been predicted that the advent of hypermedia will have a dramatic impact on education. Now, particularly since the introduction of Apple's Hypercard in August, 1987, hypermedia is becoming widely available to educators for the first time. What effect is hypertext having on pedagogy? "Teaching with Hypertext" will bring together teachers from a wide variety of disciplines, both within and outside of academia, to consider how easily available, cheap hypermedia is influencing them and their students. Desirable topics for papers include examples of applications of hypertext in both formal classroom settings, and independent or less structured learning environments; sound and video applications with hypertext; the impact of hypermedia on form and pace of curriculum; and the relationship between traditional hard-copy learning resources and hypermedia. Please send a 500 word abstract by Friday, March 15 to: Neel Smith Department of Classics Bowdoin College Brunswick ME 04011 or dsmith@wjh12.harvard.edu ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 19:01:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: HUMANIST's preoccupations (31 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I found Lou Burnard's report fascinating; pity he didn't supply it marked up in SGML, but wotthehell.... anyway, can I add two further observations to his remarks on trends? The first is serious: HUMANISTs are predominantly literary, and there are a high proportion of classicists amongst us (I include biblical scholars in that), far more than any normal average. For one reason or another, the discussion does not often cover history, music, archaeology, fine art, languages etc; is this because these subjects are covered in other ways or because literary types are naturally argumentative? I suggest that HUMANIST could become a ghetto one day... The second point is trivial, and prompted by a lunch-time conversation with the a fellow-HUMANIST here (there aren't many of us in Southampton...); why aren't more contributions funny? OK, the worlds a miserable place, and we are all desperately trying to get on in the rat race, but computers are not THAT important.... sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 19:03:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ICON (37 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I was interested in Richard Goerwitz's promotion of Icon (sorry Richard my mailer *refuses* to talk to you, by the way), and Mark Olsen's rebuttal. I am afraid I cannot share Richard's claim that Icon is easy to learn; I enjoy using it, as I used to use Snobol and after that it seems like the ideal language, but when I tried to teach it to 1st year students last year, they floundered. It is TOO rich, are too many features, for easy comprehension (sounds like ADA!). But equally, I think Mark is being unfair; why does he *want* random access files for the tasks Icon was designed for? Its tracing facilities are good enough for the casual punter, who never uses a debugger anyway (well, I never have and never want to, nor do I know any 8x86 assembler). It ISNT a system language, its a utility, exploratory, prototyping language. I do concur that a Turbo-style environment would be lovely, but there are still people out there would don't use PCs, y'know... to me, the major criticism of Icon as a daily language is that it cant create pure executables in the current version (nor is such a thing planned, so far as I know). This makes it awkward to give programs to friends. Mark could always add random access functions himself (at least in the Unix version) by creating a personalised interpreter. sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 19:05:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Job announcement (44 lines) ---------------------------- From Nancy Ide Job Announcement Instructor in Computer Literacy Vassar College The Department of Computer Science seeks applicants for an Instructor in Computer Literacy beginning September 1988. Candidates holding a doctorate will be given highest priority though others who demonstrate appropriate experience or credentials will be considered. Prior teaching experience in computer literacy is strongly desirable. Candidates should have a broad familiarity with computer literacy issues and an in-depth knowledge of microcomputing in a Macintosh environment, including Pascal programming, word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and similar software applications. Experience with a VAX/VMS computing system is a plus. The teaching load is five courses per year. Vassar is a coeducational liberal arts college of 2,250 students located in the Hudson Valley, approximately ninety minutes north of New York City. The Department of Computer Science consists of five full-time faculty members. Vassar is a charter member of the Carnegie-Mellon InterUniversity Consortium for Educational Computing and has participated in numerous national projects in educational computing for liberal arts colleges. Salary is dependent upon qualificatinos. Candidates should send a resume, transcript(s), three letters of recommendation, and a letter stating teaching interests to: Dr. Martin Ringle, Chairman, Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. Application closing date is March 30, 1988. An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women and Minority candidates are encouraged to apply. ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 19:53:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More on ICON (46 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz Mark Olsen is correct in saying that a decent debugger would be nice for Icon. I, however, have found little trouble using it without one. I'm not claiming to be a hot-shot programmer. In fact, I would say quite the opposite. Still, I can often crank out huge amounts of nearly error- free Icon in a few hours. It's really amazing how easy programming in Icon is. I say this because, if I were thinking about learning to program, I would probably have been turned away from Icon by Mark's comments. This would, at least in my case, have been a very drastic error. Version 7 of Icon has much better debugging facilities. As for random disc access, please note the new seek function in version 7. Clearly Icon does not offer low-level hardware control, but you can now at least go to whatever line you want in a file. Combination editor-compiler packages are nice, I think. However, most of the time compilers are not set up this way. Turbo Pascal and a few other packages stand out as notable exceptions. The lack of such facilities would not discourage me from learning a particular programming language! I say this not to get into any dispute with Mark. Actually, he points out some very important things to keep in mind when looking at Icon. I just wanted to point out that, having had the experience of self-teaching myself to program, Icon has proved an excellent choice. You might argue that I am just so fantastically intelligent that any way I had approached this task would have worked out. This, however, would be completely false, since I am just an everage Joe who wanted to start doing things for himself.... -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 22 February 1988, 20:06:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Sebastian's points (32 lines) Sebastian, my friend, I recall that the last time we tried to be funny, or perhaps were funny, our unfortunate colleagues in New Zealand, who were paying to read our flames about flaming, objected. (They are gone now, I hope only temporarily, and they are gone *because of* the cost.) The real reason for so little humour amongst us, however, may be that being funny, or delightfully imaginative, is very hard! Being serious, without wit or irony, is much easier. It may also be only appropriate to the kind of forum we have, though I hope not. As for the literary bias of HUMANIST, I disagree. If literary types were in the majority of those who hold forth, then I'd guess that we'd have heard more, for example, on the subject of software for problems of literary scholarship. We do hear a fair bit about linguistic problems, however. It would be very interesting to have a Burnardian analysis of the backgrounds of our members, at least as far as the biographies would reveal them. Is anyone willing to do that? (Some of you will remember that such an analysis was one of the original aims of the Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources, of which HUMANIST was the first public expression.) Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas [bitnet] ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:14:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Iconography (40 lines) ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen Don't get me wrong. I like Icon and would use it over SNOBOL4+, save that the support levels for a PD language have to be minimal. One can't expect the kind of support and development for Icon that a commercially supported product receives. What this really boils down to is a plea for a commercially supported version of Icon, one that can be used for writing larger, more complex applications. I'll have to look at version 7, I think I'm back at 6.n, to see what improvements have been added. Sabastian is quite right that I am being unreasonable about wanting random access disk files (and other goodies) in a language that is designed to be something else. This is because I am simply too damned lazy to try to implement the kinds of things that SNOBOL and Icon have built in -- associational arrays, pattern matching etc -- in another language in order to get standard services like random disk i/o and faster i/o. The mere thought of the number of pointers required to implement an Icon table gives me gas pains. So I write most of my analysis programs in SNOBOL4 and wish that SOMEBODY ELSE would do the dirty work. As for a debugger, I had a student writing a program in Icon who managed to bomb the system when he tried to call a procedure with several large parameters. Only after MUCH experimentation was he able to detect the problem. More effective debugging would help there. There is enough good about Icon to lament the fact that it is supported only by volunteer effort. I suspect that I am not the only one in the world who uses these "prototyping" languages for more serious applications rather than try to write similar programs in other languages. Mark ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:15:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Dangers of Ghetto Mentality (32 lines) ---------------------------- From ROBERT E. SINKEWICZ I was very pleased to read Sebastian's comments and I quite agree that HUMANIST is leaning very heavily in the direction of becoming a ghetto for those whose primary interest is in text oriented computing. I would guess that this is in part a reflection of the way in which the humanities have been segregated in specialized departments that very often do not talk to one another. I believe that HUMANIST would be failing in its purpose if it does not contribute to overcoming this sort of compartmentalization of knowledge. To take only one example, as best as I can recall there have been no more than four or five references to the research possiblities of relational databases since last August. And yet relational databases and their statistical counterparts are becoming increasingly common in historical studies. Where are all the historians, archaeologists, and even the librarians??? Perhaps Toronto is unusual in having several major research projects that are heavily computerized and adopt a more interdisciplinary approach to their work. For example, REED - Records of Early English Drama (not just the texts but any and all information about their historical, social and economic context); ATHENIANS - a Who-was-who in old Athens; DEEDS - statistical analysis of the medieval charters of Essex county; GIP - Greek Index Project (everything you want to know about Greek manuscripts anywhere in the world). And this is only the short list. Where are all the other HUMANISTS who are doing interesting things with information databases, building such interesting tools as PROLOG expert systems to analyze data? I have nothing against texts. I read a lot of them, have edited a few of them (Byzantine texts), but I do insist that texts have contexts - historical, social, economic, etc. Robert Sinkewicz (ROBERTS@UTOREPAS) Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies University of St. Michael's College Toronto ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:26:13 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Solomon's solemn silence (31 lines) ---------------------------- From Norman Zacour I cannot speak about those interested in "music, archaeology, fine art etc.", but if we lack contributions about computing and history it may be because most historians who deal with personal computers are primarily interested in word processors and data processors, both highly developed in the business world and therefore leaving little for the academic to get worked up about. It's the newness of some things that leads to excitement: one can appreciate and welcome the advent of WordPerfect 5.0, which with its competitors will allow the production of oceans of books, but it lacks the explosive excitement of invention, like that of Mr. Crapper in the 19th century. Rather it is all very serious business. It was Mark Twain, though I wish it had been I, who, in discussing our profession, said that many things do not happen as they ought, most things do not happen at all, and it is for the conscientious historian to correct these defects. It's a terrible burden, being conscientious, and leaves little room for frivolity. I do not know where Twain said it, and so I follow notices to HUMANIST about marking up text, hoping that when the entire corpus of biblical, Greek and Latin literature has been thoroughly annotated, perhaps then... Norman Zacour (Zacour@Utorepas) ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:31:35 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Thanks; Dictionaries (83 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz Thanks for the many replies on Hebrew parsing programs. I will have a fair number of leads to follow up over the next few weeks. I promise to post re- sults - should any be forthcoming. This is perhaps as good a time as any to clear up an apparent misunderstand- ing. Some individuals took it to mind that I was opposed to the idea of a dictionary. This was probably based on my aversion to lemmatized or other- wise analyzed text. The two are not the same. I'd like to explain why. Let me back up and explain first why I want to find out about parsing methods. Basically, I would like to do more than simply look for patterns (grepping, say) - more even than looking for keywords, as in a lemmatized concordance. I want to locate syntactic and other sorts of patterns. There's no sense offer- ing Hebrew examples here. Too many people on the HUMANIST have other areas of expertise. Let me point out, though, that "grammatical" searches are some- thing almost anyone involved in linguistics or some form of language-study would find useful. To facilitate such searches, some folks have apparently lemmatized (i.e. added dictionary entry keys) to texts. Others have actually separated out morphemes or labled words as to their syntactic category. This is a good thing to do. I make no bones about it. However, one must keep in mind that programs which use these texts are not really parsing. They may be doing some parsing. The real grammatical analysis, though, has already been done by the editor of the text. In my mind, this offers several distinct disadvantages. First of all, what if the editors change their minds about something? They have to re-edit the en- tire text, and then redistribute it. Worse yet, what if a user doesn't agree with the editors' notions of morpheme boundaries, of grammatical categories, or of syntactic structure? He basically has to ignore the information provided, or else try to weed out whatever he can use. For Semiticists, let me offer some examples (I'm talking mostly Heb., some Ara- maic). Do we call a participle an adjective or a noun? Do we include a cate- gory "indirect object" (yes, says Kutcher; no, say I). Are infinitives absol- ute to be classified as adverbs, nouns, verbs, or what (sometimes one or ano- ther of these classes will be better)? The problem we are getting into here is that in Hebrew, a word's class will depend partly on morphology, and partly on its external syntax. It's not like Latin, where the morphology will pretty much tell us a word's class. Nor is it like English, where external syntax or the lexicon will usually tell us this information. Whether we adopt a tradit- ional, morphological approach to classification (the "classical" tradition - which likes to impose Greek or Latin categories on languages where it is com- pletely inappropriate), or a more broad one, will be terribly subjective. My feeling, therefore, is that if I can, I'd like to find out if a true parser is possible for biblical Hebrew. Sure, I'll used analyzed text if I need to. I want to know, however, if the other alternative is - even dimly - feasible. Now, about the dictionary: I have no objection to one. Certainly native speakers of any language will memorize a great deal. So why shouldn't our parsing programs? If I have to lexicalize tense distinctions like "go" and "went," why not let my parser lexicalize them, too? I also have no objection to front ends to parsers, which have lists of the most frequent words handily pre-analyzed. Using such a module cuts down the amount of work a parser has to do, while not crippling it in any way. In sum, then, I don't at all object to tables, dictionaries, etc. Nor do I object to analyzed text. It's just that in the latter case, I'd like to try to see whether I can get along without it. Again, if anyone knows of any relevant articles on Semitic languages (like, say the recent one on Arabic in Computers in Translation), please drop me a line! Many thanks again. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:35:00 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hypertext, on-line dictionaries (80 lines) ---------------------------- From elli@husc6.BITNET (Elli Mylonas) >This is partly in response to Joe Giampapa's question about on- >line dictionaries for natural language processing and partly a >description of a hypertext system which HUMANISTS may be >interested in knowing about. Since the Perseus Project was mentioned by Randall Smith in a recent posting, I would like to clarify and add to his description of the project. >Greg Crane at the Harvard University Classics Department is >working on a model Greek hypertext system called "Perseus." This >model, when complete, will have a Greek text linked to an >_apparatus criticus_, dictionary, grammar, metrical scansion, and >commentary for teaching purposes. The Perseus Project is collecting visual and textual data on Classical Greece and putting it together in such a way that it may be used for teaching and research. The project is taking place both at Harvard and at Boston University. The textual data will consist of Greek texts, translations, meter, app. crit. and notes. The latter two items may not be provided for every text, but will certainly be available for a basic canon. (Don't jump on me, we will be asking professors what they consider canonical for inclusion.) The system will also include a Greek lexicon (the Intermediate Liddel Scott Lexicon) and a classical encyclopedia. All this will be linked together to allow access from one part of the database to the others, and to allow a user to look up a word while in a text, or to see a picture or a map that are relevant. By the way, all our texts will be encoded using content markup in accordance with the SGML standard, so that they may be as machine independant as possible. >As far as I know this work is >being done using Lightspeed C on a Macintosh (probably a Mac II). We are working on Macintoshes, it is true. We are developing material on Mac II's, but most of it will run on a Mac plus, and the parts that won't will tell you that they don't. We are using Hypercard, however, so that we can avoid writing software as much as possible, and concentrate our efforts on the content and how to organize it. The coding that must be done in-house is being done with Lightspeed. >One of the things it will incorporate is an on-line version of >the intermediate Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon. I know that he >just received the electronic version of this lexicon, though I >have no idea how it is stored, indexed, etc. We do have the online version of the intermediate L&S. It was keyboarded in the Philipines and approximately half of its cost was defrayed by PHI. It is at the moment in alpha code with very little markup, although we are in the process of marking it up. The first task is to get as much of the morphological information out of it as possible, in order to feed that to the parser (see below). We plan on storing this in descriptive markup also. However we are aware of the difficulty of parsing meaningful content elements out of a complex document which contains almost only format information. >Also, he is using a >program written by Neal Smith at Cincinnati which does >morphological parsing of Greek words. Even though this does not >directly involve natural language processing, some of the >techniques which Greg is using may be helpful. The morphological parser, appropriately named Morpheus, was begun by Neel Smith while he was at Berkeley, but later rewritten in C and finished by Greg Crane at Harvard. It is now finished, but still needs information for its rules in order to be useful. This will be supplied from the Middle Liddel. Morpheus has been tested in beginning Greek classes at Chicago and Claremont. I have given a *very* brief description of a large project. Many details and facts have been glossed over and left out. If anyone would like more information, please note me so I can go into more detail, or send you our written information. --Elli Mylonas Research Associate, Principle Investigator Perseus Project elli@wjh12.harvard.edu ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:36:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: References for SGML wanted & Author/Editor (17 lines) ---------------------------- From elli@husc6.BITNET (Elli Mylonas) I would like recommend an article that explains why descriptive markup like that prescribed by the SGML standard is to be recommended. It described other forms of markup and compares them to descriptive markup. This was written by 3 HUMANIST's, but I think that they will not mention it, so I will. Coombs, J. H., Steven J. DeRose and Allen H. Renear, "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing" Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Nov. 1987, pp.933-947. An addendum: I will be getting a copy of SoftQuad's Author/Editor program, and will post a review to the mailing list as soon as I have had a chance to take a look at it. --Elli Mylonas elli@wjh12.harvard.edu ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 00:41:11 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: A ghetto of what kind? (40 lines) In replying to Sebastian's warning about the "literary" ghetto that we may find ourselves in, Bob Sinkewicz says, I have nothing against texts. I read a lot of them, have edited a few of them (Byzantine texts), but I do insist that texts have contexts - historical, social, economic, etc. This I applaud. This was just my substance some weeks ago, when I speculated that New Criticism and similar movements in and outside academia have caused us to take a very narrow view of what humanistic software we might want. Perhaps, as someone said, concordance software is easier to write than database software, but that does not adequately explain our more general preoccupation with The Text as an isolated object of study, perhaps even of idolatry. It's not a *literary* preoccupation that immures us in a narrower space than some would wish to inhabit but a particular and historically provincial view of what text is all about. Any literary critic worth the name (I say with no humour or subtlety) will be interested in some context or other, and this context necessarily has a history, or several histories. Database software is what one uses to keep track of such things. I'm not saying that people interested in the workings of the language on the page are wrongheaded but that the relative poverty of other kinds amongst computing humanists is not a good sign. Or have I read the innards of my chicken incorrectly? Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 09:05:02 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: HUMANIST's ghetto (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Joe Giampapa I would like to call attention to an outstanding individual who began "humanities computing" way before computing made it out of the realm of the more technically-oriented sciences. George Cowgill, a faculty member of the Brandeis Department of Anthropology, began a computerized reconstruction of either Tenochtitla'n or Teotihuac'an (or both?) years ago, using stacks of punch cards. From what I hear and have read, he has achieved considerable success with his project, and has contributed greatly to the advancement of archaeological methods of site reconstruction. I do not know what state his project is in now -- it might be "completed" (if ever one with these proportions could be completed) -- but it is at least off those darn punch cards. I am sure he would be able to provide a clearer and more thorough explanation of his work, if anyone asked. For those interested in contacting him, they can send mail to him directly at cowgill@brandeis.bitnet If, in the weird event that someone cannot get mail to him, I can serve as a message forwarder. Joe Giampapa giampapa@brandeis.bitnet or garof@brandeis.csnet or giampapa@cogito.mit.edu ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 09:45:47 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Cumulative Kurzweil lore (28 lines) ---------------------------- From Susan Hockey In summer 1985 there was a proposal to form a user group of academic Kurzweil users. I think this proposal came from the University of South Carolina. I have heard nothing more of it since and would be interested to know if it ever got off the ground and if not, whether there is enough interest now. The cumulative wisdom of five year's Kurzweil usage at Oxford can be found in my article 'OCR: The Kurzweil Data Entry Machine', in Literary and Linguistic Computing, 1 (1986), 61-67. This article describes the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine, not the Kurzweil 4000, but the recognition algorithms are the same. The main differences between the two machines are in the user interface and the fact that training and production are separate tasks on the KDEM, but not on the Kurzweil 4000. Susan Hockey SUSAN@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 09:54:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Italian computational musicology (388 lines) [Lelio Camilleri, HUMANIST and Professor of Computer Music, Conservatory of Music L. Cherubini, in Florence, Italy, has submitted the. following report in response to the recent concerns about the narrow specialization of HUMANIST. Bene! -- WM] ----------------------------------------------------------------- From Lelio Camilleri MUSICOLOGY AND THE COMPUTER IN ITALY A report on the current activity and the educational implications (Forthcoming in MUSLETTER, I, 3) Lelio Camilleri Conservatorio di Musica L. Cherubini Piazza delle Belle Arti 2 I-50122 Firenze E-mail address: CONSERVA@IFIIDG.BITNET Phone: ++39-55-282105 INTRODUCTION The Italian situation of computer assisted research in musicology is still in development even though there are some centers which carried out a permanent research activity is this field. In fact, although in Italy several centers work on computer music and an Italian Association for Computer Music (Associazione Italiana di Informatica Musicale AIMI) has been founded, the various activities are mainly focused on composition, sound synthesis or hardware/software development rather than on musicology, music theory or analysis research. The year 1987 has registered an increasing interest in the use of computer for musicological purposes. A two days seminar, sponsored by the Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali of the University of Ferrara, has been held in March to discuss the use of computer to create database or system of information retrieval for musical studies. Another important international meeting has been held in Bologna, co-sponsored by the University of Bologna and the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Menlo Park, during the International Musicological Society Conference. In this meeting (Selfridge-Field forthcoming) the participants discussed two main subjects: musical data and music analysis. The research activity on music theory and musicology in Italy, can be divided into two parts: - research in music theory, analysis and music analysis/theory software development; - musical data bases realization. RESEARCH IN MUSIC THEORY AND ANALYSIS The research work in music theory and analysis can be summarized in the following way: research project using the computer as a tool for testing musical theory or hypotheses (these works are mainly based on the notion of musical grammar) and research focused on the realization of music analysis software and its usage on musicological work. The works of Baroni et al. (1978, 1983, 1984) and of the present author (Camilleri 1985) can be classified in the first aspect of computer use in musicology. The research work of the group of Baroni and Jacoboni, University of Bologna and Modena, is the first of this kind in Italy and one of the most interesting projects. It deals with the definition of a grammar for melody and it is devoted to the examination of four different but related melodic repertoires. The first and more advanced project is concerned with the melodies of the Bach Chorales. The second project analyzes all the four parts of J.S. Bach Chorales. Finally, the third and the fourth respectively deal with a repertoire of one hundred French melodies taken from a collection of popular chansons published in 1760, and the Legrenzi's Cantatas. The ultimate goal of these research projects is to identify the structural principle of what we define a melody. The methodology used is based on the formalization of a grammar, or set of rules, which should describe by means of concepts like, kernel, transformation, primitive phrase, the hierarchical structure of a melody. This grammar is then implemented in a computer program to generate melodies whose stylistic pertinence to the original model serves to verify the theoretical assumptions. They assumptions is to define general rules for melody found in all the repertories, as well as rules belonging to a well defined musical style. My work, carried out at the Conservatory of Music of Firenze and the Musicological Division of CNUCE, starts from similar methodological grounds. The goal of this project is to define some high-level structural features of melody which should also have psychological implication. The main hypotheses concern with the perfection and imperfection of phrases, the existence of a kernel, the concept of melodic contour hierarchically related to a particular structural level. The popular melodies of North Europe has been chosen as model. In this work also the computer has been used to check the various theoretical hypotheses by means of the implementation of the formalized rules in a program and the subsequent automatic generation of melodies. Other research projects related to this kind of computer use are those of Camilleri and Carreras for the realization of an expert system, based on ESE, for musical segmentation and tonal harmonic analysis, and F. Giomi and M. Ligabue (Ligabue 1985, 1986) for the analysis of jazz improvisation. The first research project is still in the developmental stage, concerning the realization of a theoretical model based mainly on the work of Schenker, Lerdahl and Jackendoff and Keiler. It is also based on the research work of one of the authors on the musical cognitive processes (Camilleri 1987). At present time, a model of musical segmentation (Camilleri forthcoming) is in phase of completion and the testing stage is starting. The work of F. Giomi and Ligabue, two associates of the Musicological Division of CNUCE in the Conservatory of Music of Firenze, is based on similar methodologies of Baroni's and Camilleri's works. A system of rules to model the harmonic/melodic jazz improvisation has been formalized and implemented in a software tool. The software is integrated with the TELETAU system and provide a sound output by means of TELETAU sound facilities. Jazz software also supplies an interactive part in which the user can specify harmonic path, melodic scale and other musical parameters as to investigate the various aspects of jazz improvisation. Software for music analysis has been realized at the Musicological Division of CNUCE (Camilleri et al 1987), Florence. The programs currently available at the Musicological Division of CNUCE and the Conservatory of Music L. Cherubini, Firenze, fall in two categories: those which use quantitative and statistical techniques to supply information on the surface structure of musical pieces (recurrence analysis, thematic analysis) and the ones which allow a deeper analysis of a piece structure and evidence the hierarchical relations among its parts (Schenkerian analysis, pitch-sets analysis). The two sets of programs may be considered as complementary in that they produce information which allows more complete understanding of the piece from different points of view. Some of this programs are integrated with the TELETAU system. TELETAU system (Nencini et al. 1986) can also be viewed as a tool for musicological work. It is a mainframe based system which supplies sound output by a special MIDI/RS232 interface. The system features of musicological interest comprehend a musical encoding language, and several commands to decompose and process the musical data in a very flexible way. TELETAU is also accessible through the BITNET-EARN network. The Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale, University of Milano, is pursuing research on the description of musical process by means of Petri's nets and a work on the study of the orchestration. The description of musical processes uses the notion of hierarchy, concurrency and causality (Camurri, Haus, Zaccaria 1986). The other research work aims at describing by Petri's nets the rules of orchestration of a particular composer. A sound output is provide to verify the correctness of the orchestration realized. Two software realizations for analytical purposes have been carried out by L. Finarelli, University of Bologna, and W. Colombo, University of Milano, as works for dissertation thesis. The software developed by L. Finarelli is based on some elementary analysis procedure, like those of the first categories of the Musicological Division of CNUCE software, which should serve to complete a sort of score data base. The goal of the system realized by W. Colombo is to develop a set of programs for tonal harmonic analysis based on the Schoenberg's theory of Regions. The software allows the user to scrutinize the harmonic skeleton of the piece and to bring out the belonging to a particular region of a chord succession. The two works just mentioned use micro or personal computer. Finally, P. de Berardinis (1983,1984,1985), Studio di Sonologia Computazionale "E. Varese, Pescara, has realized an analysis software for atonal music which uses the pc-sets theory of A. Forte. The software package runs on Apple II computer. A kind of computer application to music theory can be found in the work of the research group of the Department of Computer Science, University of Salerno (D'Ambrosio, Guercio, Tortora 1984). They have been realized a formalism to represent musical texts and rules in a grammatical fashion which is implemented in a package of programs. This approach has the goal of building a system containing the capacity to elaborate musical texts automatically. Another work of musicological interest is the one of Barbieri and Del Duca (1986) who uses the computer to demonstrate the microtonal tuning system used by Vicentino, Colonna, Sabatini, and Buliowski. MUSICAL DATA BASE REALIZATION The realization of musical data base is the aim of several projects which have also the feature to concern with other artistic fields as poetry and theater and educational or printed musical sources. The first project started four years ago at the University of Bologna and it is carried out by people working on the research about the grammar for melody at the same University. This project deals with the realization of a system which allows to handle information about the Emilian libretti of the XVII and XVIII centuries (Baroni et al. 1987). The data of each libretto, composer, librettist, title, year, place, performers, are encoded in a personal computer. An information retrieval system makes discovery of historical kind and crossed data analysis possible. The data of about 4000 libretti have been actually encoded. The other project is carried out by the collaboration among several Institution as the University of Ferrara, Rome, Pisa and the University of California at Berkeley. It deals with the Italian lyric poetry of the Renaissance in musical and literary prints. The aim is to realize a 100.000 poetic texts data base, for publication information and retrieval of "lost" poetry from music part-books. The Italian part of the project is more related to the literature aspects. Furthermore, we have to mention the library of encoding musical pieces of the Musicological Division of CNUCE, about 1000 pieces of different authors. The library is also accessible from remote users belonging to the Earn-Bitnet network and is made easy by a query system. A large project, financed by funds of Ministry of Cultural Funds, has been started in 1987, concerning musical sources located in Veneto, a northern Italy region. The project deals with several fields as cataloguing printed music, textbooks on singing education, and a music thematic catalogue of venetian music. Other two projects are the multiple indexing of performance details and text incipits of all comic operas produced in Naples form 1700 to 1750 carried out at the University of Milan under the direction of Professor Degrada, and the encoding and cataloguing of a musical funds using technical devices as OCR or CD-ROM, in which collaborate several Institutions and the Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale in Milano. CONCLUSION The situation of computer application to musicology in Italy is in evolution. As I mentioned above the use of computer at the University Department of Music and in the Conservatory is still not well established even though the people (scholars, students and researcher) who start to interest in this field is increasing. One may also hope that the realization of software for musicological purposes will be more and more concerned with the design of packages which can be used by several researchers. The software designer should be oriented to create not only experimental software, that is used only by the research group who realized it. An interesting issue related to the problem of spreading and promoting the use of computer in musical studies is its educational implications. Mainly, the use of computer in music education is only concerned with the study of the computer music itself or the study of sound processing. The music educational activities established which use the computer are the Computer Music course at the Conservatory of Music L. Cherubini in Florence, the only one in an Italian Conservatory, the computer music summer courses held at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale in Padova, and other few which also deal with electronic music. A three day seminar on Computer and Music Education has been held by myself last October at the Centro di Ricerca e Sperimentazione per la Didattica, and I will hold a summer course on Computer and Musicology next September in Florence. In my opinion, a very important question is: How could be used the methodological approach of, say, musical grammar to teach the theory of melody by computer to students ? Is it possible to integrate the methodology and the realized tools with, say, the curriculum of music history and music analysis courses ? My answer is yes, and I think this is a promising path to follow for the near future. REFERENCES SELFRIDGE-FIELD, E., forthcoming. "Computer-Based Approaches to Musical Data and Music Analysis: a Technical Exchange", in Proceedings of the XIV IMS Conference. BARBIERI, P., DEL DUCA, L., 1986. "Reinassance and Baroque Microtonal Music Research in Computer Real Time Performance, in Proceedings of the 1986 International Computer Music Conference, P. Berg (ed.), S. Francisco, Computer Music Association. BARONI, M., Jacoboni, C., 1978, "Proposal for a Grammar of Melody: The Bach Chorales", Montreal, Les Presses de l' Universite de Montreal. BARONI, M., 1983. "The Concept of Musical Grammar", Music Analysis, II, 2. BARONI, M. et al.,1984. "A Grammar for Melody. Relationships between Melody and Harmony", in Musical Grammars and Computer Analysis, M. Baroni and L. Callegari (eds.), Firenze, Holschki. BARONI, M. and JACOBONI, C., 1983. "Computer Generation of Melodies: Further Proposals", Computer and The Humanities, XVII. BARONI, M. et AL., 1987. "Libretti of Works Performed in Bologna, 1600-1800", Modena, Muchhi. CAMILLERI, L., 1985. "Un Sistema di Regole per Generare Semplici Melodie Tonali", Quaderni di Informatica Musicale, V. CAMILLERI, L., 1987. "Towards a Computational Theory of Music", in The Semiotic Web '86, T. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter. CAMILLERI, L., forthcoming. "Psychological and Theoretical Issues of Musical Segmentation". CAMILLERI, L., CARRERAS, F., GROSSI, P., NENCINI, G., A Software Tool for Music Analysis, Interface, forthcoming. CAMURRI, A., HAUS, G., ZACCARIA, R., 1986. "Describing and Performing Musical Processes", in Human Movements Understanding, Tagliasco and Morasso (eds.), Amsterdam, North-Holland. DE BERARDINIS, P., 1983. "Il Microcomputer nell' Analisi Strutturale della Musica Atonale", Quaderni di Informatica Musicale, I. DE BERARDINIS, P., 1984. " Analisi Strutturale della Musica Atonale (II)", Quaderni di Informatica Musicale, IV. DE BERARDINIS, P., 1985. "Analisi Strutturale della Musica Atonale (III)", Quaderni Informatica Musicale, V. D' AMBROSIO, P., GUERCIO, A., TORTORA, G., 1984 "Music Theory by Means of Relational Grammars", Internal Report, Dipartimento di Informatica e Applicazioni, Salerno, Universita' di Salerno, LIGABUE, M., 1985. "Un Sistema di Regole per l' Improvvisazione nel Jazz", in Atti del VI Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, Milano, Unicopli. LIGABUE, M., 1986. "A System of Rules for Computer Improvisation", in Proceedings of the 1986 International Computer Music Conference, P. Berg (ed.), S. Francisco, Computer Music Association. G. NENCINI, e al., 1986. "TELETAU - A Computer Music Permanent Service", in Proceedings of the 1986 International Computer Music Conference, P. Berg (ed.), S. Francisco, Computer Music Association. Acknowledge-To: Lelio Camilleri *****END***** ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 10:08:14 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Kurzweil lore? (26 lines) ---------------------------- From PROF NORM COOMBS I am a kind of Kurzweil user. Not primarily for data entry although I have done some and expect to do more. I am totally blind history prof at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I use a KRM to do some of my reading. On occasion I have connected through a bi-directional terminal to our VAX and read the material simultaneously by "ear" and also into a text file. If there is an "accumulated body of wisdom" especially about text entry, I surely could benefit by learning more than I know... which is not much. Looking forward to more info. Norman Coombs ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 18:49:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: KDEM and scanning (29 lines) ---------------------------- From Bob Kraft Like Oxford, CCAT has a KDEM III (not the newer 4000). There are a number of ways to trick the machine to read more efficiently, although I do not know whether they will work as well on the 4000. One easy and obvious (once you think about it) tactic is to let the machine tell you what it reads and develop an artificial coding in that manner, to be changed to the desired coding later through tailoring. Thus for Hebrew, the resh looks to the KDEM like a "7" and the beta looks a "2" and the dalet is enough like a "T" to get by, etc. Of course, ambiguities must be avoided, but it really helps the scanner to guess correctly. And there are more such tricks, if this is really what Robin Cover is after. May I use this occasion to renew my scanner question -- has anyone developed the ability to go directly from microform (film, fiche) to electronic form, without a hardcopy intermediate? I still have not found a concrete lead to such technology. Bob Kraft (CCAT) ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 18:51:38 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Work on on-line dictionaries (16 lines) ---------------------------- From Terry Langendoen I understand that Prof. Herbert Stahlke, Dept. of English, Ball State University, has a project for making large on-line dictionaries available in a variety of environments. I don't have an email address for him, but I'm sure he'd be receptive to inquiries by regular post or phone. ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 18:53:29 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CALL (Romance essays) ---------------------------- From Joanne Badagliacco Does anyone out there know of any programs to teach foreign languages - particularly essay writing in Romance languages? German and Russian would also be interesting. Please reply to Joanne Badagliacco (JMBHC@CUNYVM). ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 19:00:26 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ghetto mentality (58 lines) ---------------------------- From ked%garnet.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Charles Faulhaber) All right, I have under development a relational data base for the primary sources of medieval Spanish literature, i.e., MSS and early printed books.It is written in Advanced Revelation, an MS-DOS-based dbms like DBase but considerably more flexible: variable-length fields, no limits on number of fields and number of records. The only real limit is that records can be no more than 64K and no field can be no more than 64K. The Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts (BOOST) has evolved from a system based on FAMULUS at the U. of Wisconsin which originally had 19 data elements. The current version has 7 related files (biography, uniform title, libraries, MSS, copies [printed books], contents [information about specific copies of a given text in a given MS or ed.], and secondary bibliography) with some 300 data elements. Still to come are a subject file and major additions to some of the other ones. E.g., for biography we want to add standard prosopographical information. Advanced Revelation is a window-based system which is designed to allow for the integration of information from a number of different files in any given window as well as for customizable sorts of all kinds. We eventually plan to use the system as a data base front end for a corpus of machine-readable texts in medieval Spanish. Many of these already exist, having been transcribed for the purposes of the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language at the U. of Wisconsin directed by John Nitti and Lloyd Kasten. We are focussing on 1992, since our corpus represents the literary culture which Spain took to America; and we hope that storage developments and compression algorithms will have developed sufficiently so that in addition to the data base and the texts themselves we will also be able to include a good selection of digitized facsimiles of significant MSS, probably on a CD-ROM disk. (I would be interested in more information aboaut the GIP [Greek Index Project].) Charles B. Faulhaber (ked@garnet.bitnet) ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 19:04:06 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ICON and SPITBOL... (30 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Giordano I haven't used ICON yet, but I have been programming extensively in different version of SNOBOL for just about ten years. If ICON is anything like SPITBOL, it is true that you can learn to write complicated string-handling and symbol manipulation programs in little more than a couple of weeks. As many people know, SNOBOL is a powerful tool for text analysis and retrieval, and ICON seems to be even more powerful than SNOBOL, particularly because it's a structured language. I really have to agree with Richard Goerwitz's praise. I'm a little puzzled over the comments I've read regarding indexing files with ICON. I use IBMPC SPITBOL, and I have had no problem indexing records, and retrieving them. In fact, I created a pretty large database system written entirely in IBMPC SPITBOL. Maybe I am puzzled because I am mis-reading the comments. Richard Giordano Computing and Information Technology Princeton University RICH@PUCC ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 19:06:00 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ICON and commercial support (49 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) I don't agree at all with Mark Olsen's claim that Icon is fettered by its public domain status. Of course it would be nice if a company took it up and added goodies. But I probably couldn't afford them anyway. But look for a moment at TeX. This is a public domain product that has more support than any commerical product I can think of. Have you ever tried, for example, to get help from IBM? Or Lotus? Or Microsoft? Sometimes one strikes lucky, and will get a helpful person. But TeX has a huge and thriving community of users, including many very talented programmers, who provide a steady stream of excellent add-on programs and macros. In the first place there is TeXhax, which is a digest of questions, answers and macros produced by Malcolm Brown, which appears sometimes as often as thrice weekly! Then there is TeXmag, another on line magazine with news and more macros. There is the USENET news area comp.text which is full of TeXiana, and there is TUGboat, a tri-annual journal of the highest quality, which is again full of help and interest. The staff of the TeX Users Group are also on hand with help and advice. As I say, I have not met support like this *anywhere* else, and the commercial software I have used over the years, especially from the big companies, has been abysmally supported. It would be interesting to try and analyse just why it is that TeX has attracted the support that it has. In the first place it is a superb program: so is Icon. It is portable across systems and OSs: so is Icon. It is supported by the User group, which in turn received a lot of support from the American Mathematical Society, which uses TeX for most (perhaps all by now) of its journals. Ah! A difference. Icon does not lend itself in any obvious way for large scale use in a semi commercial environment. And I think the main reason is that it cannot produce compiled executables. As someone else said recently here in Humanist, I think this is one of its main drawbacks. I make it my general policy to prefer the PD software to the commercial as far as possible, and there are few areas where this has not led me to have better programs and better support for them. Dominik Wujastyk ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 19:07:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Greek Index Project (17 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) Robert Sinkewicz recently mentioned a project at Toronto called GIP. Could someone who knows about it please send me information about it? bitnet: user DOW on the bitnet node HARVUNXW arpanet: dow@wjh12.harvard.edu csnet: dow@wjh12.harvard.edu uucp: ...!ihnp4!wjh12!dow ========================================================================= Date: 23 February 1988, 19:08:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Kurzweil and OCRs not pundits? (14 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) Am I right in thinking that no Kurzweil or other OCR machine has yet succeeded in reading Devanagari? Dominik Wujastyk ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 00:33:54 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Parsers for Semitic languages (39 lines) ---------------------------- From Jack Abercrombie Just a quick footnote to the query on parsers for Semitic languages. As noted, Dick Whitaker wrote a parsing program for biblical Hebrew. His work was funded by CATSS Project, and its results, a parsed Hebrew text, was then collated against the Maredsous text. (Whitaker's program incidentally can be modified to work with most Semitic Languages.) Both the Maredsous biblical text and that of G. Weil were parsed by hand, and not program. As far as I know, only a few individuals have admitted to writing a parsing program for Hebrew or any Semitic language, besides Whitaker and of course Dean Forbes. Some eight years ago, Nahum Sarna informed me that his son had written such a program for Hebrew. About five years ago, one of my students wrote an automatic parsing program for Hebrew. Another student took this same work and modified the data files for Arabic. Neither version has survived, though Roger Allen and I have saved the algorithm for other purposes and it would be easy to reconstruct it if we were seriously interested. Lastly, Everhard Ditters has also written a parsing program for Arabic according to information I received from him last year. Jack Abercrombie, Assistant Dean for Computing & Director of CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 08:53:10 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SPITBOL, ICON, Brain Damage (24 lines) ---------------------------- From Lou Burnard Like Richard Giordano I've been a happy spitbol hacker for more years than I care to remember. I've also been greatly tempted by the evident superiority of icon in terms of language design structure etc. My question is, am I alone in finding it very difficult to re-think problems in iconic-ic (as opposed to snobol-ic) terms? i dont get this problem programming in other high level languages because they dont have built in string operations so similar to those of spit/snobol, but whenever i start trying to write a piece of icon code i find myself wanting to introduce gotos and call snobol functions. maybe its just my celebrated mid-life crisis. or does the snobol style actually damage the brain in the way dijkstra warned us it would? lou ========================================================================= Date: 24 Feb 88 09:01:14-EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Date: 24 February 1988, 08:55:41 EST From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS To: HUMANIST at UTORONTO Cc: ralph at arizona.edu, icon-project at arizona.edu Subject: Griswold and ICON ---------------------------- From R.J.Hare@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Why doesn't someone try and contact Griswold et. al. at Arizona and invite them a to contribute to the current discussion of Icon? I have tried and failed (for reasons which are not clear to me) to contact them by electronic mail from here, but I'm sure that they would be interested in the current discussion (if they aren't already aware of it). As an indication of the power and versatility of Icon, I might say that the first program I wrote using Icon was an editor (yeah, I know context editors are passe, but it seemed a useful starting exercise for a language whose strong points include powerful string processing capabilities), and I was amazed that I was able to get a more or less working editor, albeit a very simple one, after only a few days 'spare-time' effort, particularly as I hadn't done any *real* string processing before. I'm a fan, and if I had more time I'd be a better one. [Note that a copy of this message is being sent to Ralph Griswold. W.M.] ========================================================================= Date: 24 Feb 88 09:02:41-EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Date: 24 February 1988, 09:01:42 EST From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS To: HUMANIST at UTORONTO Cc: ralph at arizona.edu Subject: Icon and the PD ---------------------------- From Mark Olsen I would like to agree with Dominik Wujastyk's comments regarding PD software. There is some good stuff out there. But I'm not sure that the example of TEX is appropriate as, from what I understand, one purchases it through one of several vendors, each of whom might add something to the TEX standard and give more or less support to particula printers/environments/etc. I know we have looked at TEX for the PC and found the price at about $250, with options for additional printer support. This is not PD software, at least as I define it. Developers have taken a good design, ported it to particular machines and added other support. Software marketed by the major manufacturers and small houses can all attract good users groups (and Lord knows we need a KDEM_SIG) and other levels of "informal" support. I have also had some good experiences with smaller developers, who take an intense interest in the product and in customer satisfaction. I see the PD as a testing ground for design ideas, the most successful of which appear in later incarnations as either "shareware" or commercial ventures. I don't really want to depend on the spare time of some individuals to improve products and design reasonable upgrade paths. I'm more than willing to shell out the price for WordPerfect or PC-Write (remember it ain't PD), both of which are good products, than to try to find some PD product that is only a third as effective. I think that Icon is probably at the point in its life where it could be reasonably picked up by a small developer, like Catspaw or the developer of SPITBOL for the PC, and given real support at a fair price. I know academics are broke, but that does not mean that we should really try to get something for nothing. Mark ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 09:02:58 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: WordCruncher texts (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Randall Jones Electronic Text Corporation, home of the text retrieval program known as WordCruncher, has recently announced a number of indexed texts that can be used with WordCruncher. These include the Riverside Shakespeare; ten volumes from the Library of America collection, viz. Franklin, Jefferson, Melville, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Henry James, London; a collection of approximately 50 writings on the U.S. Constitution (including Federalist Papers), and the King James Bible. Texts in progress include the Oxford Shakespeare, additional volumes from the Library of America, other English bibles, the Hamburg edition of the complete works of Goethe, and the Pfeffer spoken German corpus. Because of agreements with the publishers these texts cannot be sold simply as electronic texts, but can only be used with WordCruncher. For additional information as well as suggestions for texts to be made available for the future send me a BITNET note or write or call: Electronic Text Corporation 5600 N University Ave Provo, Utah 84604 801-226-0616 Randall Jones, Director Humanities Research Center Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602 801-378-3513 ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 09:04:54 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Line-counts; the fileserver (36 lines) Following the suggestion of a HUMANIST in the U.K., I have almost faithfully been adding line-counts to the subject lines of messages. I have not counted the lines myself but used the built-in line-counter provided me by the operating system I use, CMS. This counter registers the total number of lines in a message, including the header. It's not much work to do this, and I'll continue to do it without protest, but I want to make sure that some of you are finding this count useful. Please let me know >>only if you are<<. On another matter, I propose that henceforth announcements of conferences be posted once to all of us, then transferred to the fileserver for future reference. I also invite anyone with relevant bibliographies, catalogues (such as the SNAPSHOT of the Oxford holdings, Lou), or technical reports, to submit them for storage on the server together with a very brief notice that will be sent to all HUMANISTs when the material is ready for access. The biographies will be kept there, and I encourage anyone whose life has changed in a way that he or she wants to announce, to fetch the relevant file, make the update, and send me the results. Shortly we will make efforts to see what can be done to store public-domain packages on the server. One HUMANIST, David Sitman, has already sent me a number of very useful suggestions about the operation of the server. I invite others to do the same. Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 10:05:10 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Jean Talon Project (44 lines) ---------------------------- From (M.J. CONNOLLY [Slavic/Eastern]) From my involvement with the Domesday Project, as user, adapter and evaluator, I have also been kept informed about a similar Canadian project, namely the Jean Talon project, which seeks to have the next Canadian census follow the Domesday mode of collection and publication (Domesday was a stock-taking of British life in the '80s). This type of project requires the combining of data and text from all disciplines, visual and cartographic material to accompany same, and well-designed programs to integrate same and present it in an interface that can be used by journalists, officials, businessmen, but primarily by teachers, researchers, and students. It is an excellent example of what recent HUMANIST discussions have been seeking: TEXT in CON-TEXT. The moving force behind Jean Talon is: Mr Victor B. Glickman, Regional Director Statistics Canada 25 St Clair Avenue East Toronto Ontario M4T 1M4 tel: (416) 973-6591. He will certainly be glad to send scholars information and to put them on his 'network' (unfortunately snail-mail). One might like to see how HUMANIST and Jean Talon could link up or, at very least, interact. The project is most ambitious, but Glickman seems to be covering all the bases for funding sources, project organization, and learning from others' mistakes. I can see the need for a good dose of 'humanistic' input here, though. Prof M.J. Connolly Slavic & Eastern Languages Boston College / Carney 236 Chestnut Hill MA 02167 ( U . S . A .) (617)552-3912 cnnmj@bcvax3.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 11:18:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Text retrieval & related programs for Macintoshes (26 lines) FROM John J. Hughes Help needed from HUMANISTS! Other than SONAR (Virginia Systems Software Services, Inc.) and SQUARE NOTE (Union Software), what commercial and noncommercial text retrieval, concording, and text analysis programs are available for Macintoshes? Thank you in advance for your help. John J. Hughes Bits & Bytes Computer Resources 623 Iowa Ave. Whitefish, MT 59937 (406) 862-7280 XB.J24@Stanford.BITNET ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 13:08:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROMs (21 lines) ---------------------------- From Joe Giampapa I am asking this question out of curiosity ... It sounds like a few HUMANISTS are using CD-ROM technology for saving their texts. For those who are, may I ask what the process is that you use to do so? Specifically, what company(ies) are involved (or is it on site?), what do you do for the CD-ROM reader, and what is the cost of all this? Joe Giampapa giampapa@brandeis.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 13:11:19 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM, etc. (31 lines) ---------------------------- From O MH KATA MHXANHN I noticed this morning in the February issue of Micro/Systems the following jetsam among "Random Gossip & Rumors": Later this year, Sony, Sharp, and Verbatim are expected to introduce high-capacity, removable, rewritable, optical disk drives that may challenge Winchester hard disks as primary storage devices. Sony's drive is expected to store 650 MB, have a 120-millisecond access time, use an SCSI interface, and cost about $1,000. I wonder if the digital cognoscenti of this group regard this information as (a) likely to be true (b) optimistic (c) vaporously induced phantasmagoria (d) a lengthy typographical error (e) all of the above (f) none of the above. ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 13:14:09 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SNOBOL4/brain damage (42 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz Since SNOBOL4 and Icon are languages particularly suited to Humanistic uses, I don't think that this will be too much of a sidetrack. In response to Lou Burnard's query about switching from SNOBOL/SPITBOL to Icon, let me say that I actually sent a letter on this to Griswold (the creator of Icon) at arizona.edu. I also sent a similar letter to Mark Emmer, who markets a SNOBOL4 implementation for MS-DOS. Let me comfort you: Appar- ently lots of folks have trouble re-thinking SNOBOL4 problems in Icon. The reason is partly that Icon is much more procedurally oriented. More than this, though, its string-scanning functions are much lower-level and better integrated into the rest of the language. What this means is that you'll need to write actual procedures called ARB, ARBNO, RARB, etc. To call them at run-time, you'll need to use the "call-by-string" feature available on Icon versions 6 and up. This will be a pain until you get used to it. Once you get used to it, Icon becomes a much more powerful tool to work with. I guess the trouble with SNOBOL4 and Icon is that SNOBOL4 looks a little like Icon in some respects - just enough to be dangerous! If you want advice at any point, try emailing to the icon-project@arizona.edu. They are busy with version 7 now, but generally they return mail within two days. Apparently they enjoy a show of interest & questions. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 14:51:28 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Latin analysis software (21 lines) ---------------------------- From Bob Kraft Jean Schumacher at CETEDOC in Belgium (NETDOC@BUCLLN11) reminds me that CETEDOC has been involved in analysis of Latin texts for about two decades and is willing to explore ways in which its programs and experience can be of assistance to others -- for example, files might be sent electronically to CETEDOC for analysis and the results returned in the same way. CETEDOC also supports the suggestion that an inventory list of such programs and services would be helpful. Bob Kraft (CCAT) ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 18:34:13 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Snobol vs. Icon (21 lines) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) I believe icon is not the clearcut step forward some would have us believe. It solved a number of problems computer scientists had with snobol as a language--but it seems unclear to me that these were problems that non-computer scientists were experiencing. I believe snobol is excellent for small programs that either do complex extractions or rewrites of data. As the programs get larger, the programming language theory defects in snobol may become unreasonable; I certainly wouldn't advocate it as the best language in which to build complex systems with thousands of lines of code--but frankly some of the changes between snobol and icon are NOT steps toward making the language easier to use. ========================================================================= Date: 24 February 1988, 18:41:04 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: Random Gossip and Rumors (about mass-storage media) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) Optimistic, or possibly even ``run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes''. The events are very desirable goals from the vendors perspectives, but there current capabilities put them further away from realizing these than the rumor would seem to suggest. If you replaced later this year with within 3 years I'd find it more believable. If you changed the price to $3000 (which might mean they wouldn't make it) it would also be more reasonable. So, how is this... Within 3 years Sony will be marketing a $3000, 1 Gigabyte erasable optical disc. ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 09:28:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Random gossip and rumors about magneto-optical technology, cont. ---------------------------- From Robin C. Cover The "rumor" alluded to by McCarthy is probably second generation, at least. There was a report in PCWeek to the same effect: that Sony's magneto-optic drive would cost $1000 this summer, have a data-transfer rate of 680K per second, 650 megabytes of read/write 120 millisecond access time disk space. It sounded too good to be true so we contacted Sony...raise that to $7500. But apparently Sharp, Verbatim and Sony did demo such things at Comdex, and I have heard of another vendor releasing a magneto-optic read/write drive in "first quarter" this year, allegedly having 45 megabytes per side on the disk, 30 millisecond access time, and costing around $1500. More dreaming? If anyone knows anything reliable about magneto-optical, I'd like to hear it. Robin C. Cover ZRCC1001@SMUVM1.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 09:34:44 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Icon/Snobol (26 lines) ---------------------------- From R.J.Hare@EDINBURGH.AC.UK Message-ID: <25 Feb 88 09:22:36 gmt 340163@EMAS-C> Those interested in the Icon versus Snobol aspect of the Icon discussions may be interested in the paper: Griswold, R.E., "Implementing SNOBOL4 Pattern Matching in Icon", Compute r Languages, Volume 8, pages 77-92 (funny - I don't have the date for that one, only the volume). Griswold, R.E. and Griswold, M.T, "High Level String Processing Languages: COMIT, SNOBOL4 and Icon", Abacus, Volume 3, No 4, pages 32-44, Summer 1986. If anyone were that interested, I could mail them a bibliography of about 30 Icon related items... Roger Hare. ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 10:08:06 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Hypertexpert systems (16 lines) ---------------------------- From Sheldon Richmond Is there anyone who could tell me something about HypertExpert Systems produced by Knowledge Garden Inc? Thanks. Sheldon Richmond ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 10:10:20 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: CD-ROM, etc. (16 lines) ---------------------------- From M.J. CONNOLLY (Slavic/Eastern) Can't say too much on specs, but (a), likely to be true, is closest. Removable 50MB optical read/write, e.g. Verbatim, may be here as early as the summer. Watch for the usual 50>100>200Mb progression in capacity. Too soon to speculate on pricing, SCSI most likely. The rest is silence. ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 10:50:57 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TeX and the public domain (64 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) No, TeX really *is* in the public domain, in two important senses of the phrase. First, yes you can buy personal TeX from Lance Carnes, for $249. What you pay for is not the programming that went into TeX (what would it cost to hire Knuth for ten years!), but for the considerable work that went into rewriting the Pascal source so that it would compile and run efficiently on a PC or AT. And Carnes has done an excellent job. PCTeX runs as fast on a good AT as on a medium loaded Vax. Plus you get the TeXbook, LaTeX manual, and macros (LaTeX, AMS, Spivak's Vanilla) and installation, TFM files etc. etc. In other words, you are paying for little more than the cost of putting the package together, testing it, making it easy to run and install, and documenting it. In fact, Carnes is doing the job for the PC community that a sysop does on a mainframe machine. The full WEB source code of TeX is available from Carnes either by mail or by downloading from the PCTeX bulletin board. Secondly, TeX for Unix, VMS, Tops-20, and most other systems is avaiable for the cost of the tape, or the FTP. I expect that TeX is already available on your mainframe somewhere, if you have not already discovered it. In a purer sense of PD, there is Monardo's Common TeX. This is the translation of TeX into C. This is yours for the downloading from several sources. There is even a ready-compiled PC version, complete with the plain.fmt, available on several bulletin boards in the Boston area (E.g., Channel One, (617) 354 8873, or Viking Magic (617) 354 2171), and very probably across the country. There is another PD version, again based on a C translation (done automatically this time), and the source of that too is easily available. You would need to compile it yourself, though. Both these versions are also excellent, but you have no documentation or help in getting them up and going. Really, you have to have used TeX before on some other system, so that you know where everything should go, and how to use TeX. You also have to get your own fonts and drivers (also available in PD from Nelson Beebe@science.utah.edu). The point is, someone with the know-how and a modem could put together a perfectly good version of TeX on a PC or AT without buying anything at all. It would just take a bit of time and effort. Incidentally, Monardo is offering a C version of Metafont for beta testing, and the final version will be released into the PD very soon. The other sense of PD that I have in mind is that TeX's algorithms are freely available. I know of two commercial companies who use parts of TeX in their systems and I am sure there are others. Anyone writing a serious text processing program or word processor today is going to look very carefully at TeX's source. XyQuest have used TeX's hyphenation algorithms in their excellent word processor, XyWrite III plus. And Graham Asher of Informat, a London typesetting company, has made TeX the heart of a major professional typesetting system that his company uses and sells. (It is used to set several of Gower Publications scientific journals.) Dominik Wujastyk ========================================================================= Date: 25 February 1988, 13:02:28 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: New item on the file-server The file-server now contains a desultory bibliography on the Icon programming language. It has been submitted by Roger Hare of Edinburgh, who warns that it is simply what he has been able to gather in the last 12 months or so. Caveat emptor! (and let him or her remember that it's free). Contributions to this bibliography can be sent to me. The file is named ICON BIBLIOG. Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:09:53 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Mega-storage devices, and dreams, and things ---------------------------- From Eva Swenson I have found that promises of bigger and better eventually come true, with emphasis on "eventually". It is just a matter of time. The promise, of course, may be fulfilled with side effects even though none of these were promised. And not all the side effects are desirable. So what else is new? ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:13:04 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Snobol - Icon transition (17 lines) ---------------------------- From dow@husc6.BITNET (Dominik Wujastyk) In the Icon program library that I received with the MSDOS version of Icon 6 from Arizona, there was a file containing Icon procedures which duplicate many of the built in functions of Snobol, like LEN, BREAK, ARB and so on. I hope everyone knows this already. Dominik ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:27:47 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Producing a CD-ROM at the PHI (48 lines) ---------------------------- From John Gleason Here's what The Packard Humanities Institute and, as far as I know, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae do to produce a CD-ROM: 1. Imbed in the text files an extensive system of markers, to permit access by author, section, etc. 2. Process these files through a humungous program that constructs various directories of these markers. 3. Send the resulting tapes to a contractor who processes them into CD-ROM-type files in the "High Sierra" format which is proposed as standard by the National Information Standards Organization. The contractor we have used is: Publishers Data Service Corporation (PDSC) 2511 Garden Road, Bldg. C Monterey, CA 93940 (408) 372-2812 4. The contractor then sends his tapes to a company which makes a master CD ROM with a few copies for testing. Our contractor uses: Digital Audio Disk Corporation 1800 North Fruitridge Ave. Terre Haute, IN 47804 (812) 466-6821 5. After testing the sample CD ROM's, we order as many additional copies as we need. There are lots of detailed steps that I've omitted, but that's the general outline. John M. Gleason, The Packard Humanities Institute, xb.m07@stanford ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:29:25 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Computer scientists and SNOBOL (45 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Giordano I remember a few comments by computer scientists regarding SNOBOL, (I think they are in Wexelblat's HISTORY OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES), that may (or may not, I don't know), have been 'solved' in ICON. Aside from the whole GOTO question, there were two issues: the ambiguity regarding the use of a space (they have two meanings); and there appeared to be severe inefficiencies in execution time. I also think there might have been some discontent with SNOBOL's YES/NO/UNCONDITIONAL GOTO structure as well. One overwhelming criticism of the language is that its strength is its greatest weakness--SNOBOL's terse structure makes its programs very difficult to document. SNOBOL code written by one programmer looks like randomly-strewn characters to the next. I am not at all sure that I agree with Robert Amsler's comments on SNOBOL's limitations as a language for systems regarding thousands of lines of code. Who among us writes thousands of lines of code anyway? That sort of thing is developed by teams, teams that are managed. The selection of a programming language in a team effort has much more to do with management decisions and concerns than it has to do with the intrinsic merits of this or that particular language. This explains, in part, why there are so many FORTRAN and COBOL shops around. Computer scientists, and their opinions, usually count for little or nothing in this equation. I also think that Amsler underestimates SNOBOL's power. It can do far more than "complex extractions or rewrites of data". I've written complex parsers in SNOBOL, as well as programs that do pretty complicated manipulations, and analyses, of symbols. I agree with Amlser that the problems non-computer scientists were experiencing were different from those experienced by computer scientists. My problem with SNOBOL is that it doesn't really have the data processing punch that PL/I has, particularly when you want to pass parameters. So big deal. I do have an objection to Amsler's implicit message that computer scientists know best. They don't, but that's a different story... Rich Giordano Princeton University ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:30:41 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Stemmatic analysis of Latin mss (43 lines) ---------------------------- From Norman Zacour It has been suggested that I ask fellow Humanists for some advice about a small programming project that I have become engaged (immersed? bemired?) in. It has to do with the mechanical problems surrounding the making of critical editions of (in this case) Latin texts. As the mss. multiply and the variants begin to pile up, the difficulty of keeping them all in order increases in geometrical proportion; they have to be numbered and numbered again as new mss. are used, new variants found. One answer is to embed the variant note in the text itself, right beside its lemma, with the risk, ultimately, of introducing every kind of error when it has to be retyped and numbered preparatory to submission to a publisher. I have written a program to read a text file with such embedded notes of variants, as well as embedded "fontes" (references to sources such as the Bible, ecclesiastical authorities, etc). The program copies the variant notes into a separate file, fishes out the lemma and puts it with the note, copies the fontes into a second file, copies the text itself, now newly formatted and shorn of notes, into a third file, counts the line numbers of the new text file, and numbers both the variant notes and the fontes with the number of the lines in the newly formatted text to which they refer. It is purely a mechanical operation, but is designed to preserve a semblance of sanity and latinity. Depending on the speed of one's machine it will handle a 100,000 byte text in from 15 to 35 seconds. The next step is to have the program examine the variants themselves, classify them according to type, the purpose being to determine family relationships among the mss. involved, and so to fashion the preliminaries of a stemma. Is there anyone out there doing this sort of thing? If the response warrants it, I shall be happy to post a summary on HUMANIST so that others can keep abreast of what is going on. Norman Zacour (Zacour@Utorepas) Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies Toronto ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 12:34:01 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Help on research project by novice (53 lines) ---------------------------- From PROF NORM COOMBS I am a historian by training and only arrived recently ;by the back door in the field of communications. I have been using a computer conference system to teach distance learners. They learn material from watching videos and reading texts, but then they check into the college VAX system weekly to join a class discussion. The conference is asynchronous which allows maximum time flexibility. Most students found they needed very little computer knowledge. Those with a PC and modem who could access the system from home or work came to "love" it. We did have a lot of participation, and I felt the studetns shared more personal items than they do in my classroom meetings. Now I have a record of last fall's class. There were 56 topics with 35 to 45 replies to each. The students also wrote essay exams and submitted them by computer. It seems to me, though I am not a communications specialist, that this body of data could be useful. I intend to analyze it during the spring and hope to find useful results by summer to share with a wider scholarly community. Here are some of the items I had intended to examine. (I expect to run the data through Writers Workbench.) 1. compare conference replies with essay exams to see effect of different situation on writing. e.g. formal vs informal. Sophistication. Length of sentence and length of word. 2. Compare first and last week replies in conference for any changes in style. 3. Chart how much the discussion merely answered the professor's topic questions and how much involved interaction with other participants' comments. As I confessed previously, I am new in studying communications, and I would certainly appreciate any good hints about what might be done with this data and what kinds of tools could be helpful. Any ideas are welcomed. I will be away for a week and have had my Humanist mail stopped for the duration. Therefore direct mailings would be best as they will get through. NRCGSH@RITVAX.BITNET Norman Coombs ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 14:50:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject ODA SGML list (46 lines) Announcing the creation of an ODA/SGML mailing list. The ISO 8613 ODA/ODIF has recently been made into an International Standard. This, and the growing interest in both ODA and SGML is cause enough for a mailing list. In case you don't know, ODA stands for Office Document Architecture, ODIF for Office Document Interchange Format, and SGML for Standard Generalized Markup Language. If you are interested in these standards, or like myself are trying to use them in future products, then this mailing list is for you. Lets trade horror stories :-) To join the mailing list send mail to: oda-request@trigraph or ...utzoo!trigraph!oda-request Thanks, Michael Winser -- ...utscri!trigraph!michael Michael Winser michael@trigraph.UUCP Trigraph Inc. 5 Lower Sherbourne St. #201 (416) 363-8841 Toronto,Ontario M5R 3H8 ---------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 14:53:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: British natural language processing? (25 lines) ---------------------------- From Grace Logan I have received an urgent request from my home university for information "about the Natural Language Processing which the British Government are busy implementing." Now I would very much like to help out the folks back home, but Natural Language Processing is not something with which I have a great deal of experience. I wonder if my fellow HUMANISTs have more of an idea than I do about where to start to collect information on the topic. I should be very grateful. Grace Logan ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 15:28:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: TeX and the public domain (19 lines) ---------------------------- From ked%garnet.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Charles Faulhaber) One of the slickest WYSIWYG text formatters around is Arbortext's Publisher, currently available only for the Sun. Essentially it is a user-friendly front end for TeX with SGML style templates for various kinds of documents. It gives the end user all of the power of TeX without having to know anything about the language at all. It still needs work but it is head and shoulders above any text formatting system I know. ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 15:31:50 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Stemmatic analysis of Latin mss. (14 lines) ---------------------------- From ked%garnet.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Charles Faulhaber) The TUSTEP program written by Wilhelm Ott (Tuebingen) is designed to handle these kinds of problems. Francisco Marcos Marin (Madrid) also has a mainframe IBM program for this. ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 15:33:58 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ODA SGML list (38 lines) Announcing the creation of an ODA/SGML mailing list. The ISO 8613 ODA/ODIF has recently been made into an International Standard. This, and the growing interest in both ODA and SGML is cause enough for a mailing list. In case you don't know, ODA stands for Office Document Architecture, ODIF for Office Document Interchange Format, and SGML for Standard Generalized Markup Language. If you are interested in these standards, or like myself are trying to use them in future products, then this mailing list is for you. Lets trade horror stories :-) To join the mailing list send mail to: oda-request@trigraph or ...utzoo!trigraph!oda-request Thanks, Michael Winser -- ...utscri!trigraph!michael Michael Winser michael@trigraph.UUCP Trigraph Inc. 5 Lower Sherbourne St. #201 (416) 363-8841 Toronto,Ontario M5R 3H8 ---------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: 26 February 1988, 21:57:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Snobol comments (53 lines) ---------------------------- From amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler) Curious. I was deliberately striving to say that computer scientists DON'T know all that much about ease of use--or rather that concerns about formal syntax, theoretical power and such might get in the way of concerns about simplicity of learning, etc. Another good example of this is BASIC. BASIC is a fine language for simplicity of understanding--which was its intended goal; however, I cringe at the thought of someone writing complex system in BASIC. I am a computational linguist. It is QUITE reasonable for some massive projects to be carried out in academia. They could even be done by a lone individual. I do feel that today someone should not undertake such a project in Snobol. When one gets to doing things like writing mechanical translation systems or creating symbolic algebra interpreters or developing text understanding systems--the need is for a suitable contemporary language. These projects ALSO should not be done in Fortran or C or Pascal. They probably should be done in LISP or Prolog. They MAY be done in Fortran or C or Pascal at commercial shops because they expect to sell the resultant software to people who can only run in those environments--but in research labs or academic institutions this isn't even typically the case. Finally, I didn't intend the somewhat stronger statement that Snobol is only good for rewrites or extractions. These happen to be the two broadest classes of tasks I can think of for its use. Parsing IS a rewrite system, incidentally. So, parsing isn't something I'd have excluded in that even IF I had meant it in the strongest sense. If I were to try and imagine what tasks are not rewrites or extractions I'd probably have to say numerical computations. A concordance is a rewriting task; automatic indexing is an extraction task. These seem perfectly suited to Snobol, being rather simple procedures. Ah, there is one other class of programs--generation systems. Snobol would also be excellent there. The main point of my message was that I was trying to describe the justifications I could see for someone using Snobol RATHER THAN any other language for some tasks. If one assumed that someone didn't know any programming language and was prepared to learn a language; under what circumstances should the language they learn be Snobol rather than Icon, C, Fortran, Basic, Lisp, Pascal, etc. I believe there are reasons this is true. I also believe there are tasks in which they should not learn Snobol, but should instead learn Icon, etc. ========================================================================= Date: 28 February 1988, 12:42:21 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Correction of address for SGML list (14 lines) On 26 February I circulated a notice about a ListServ list devoted to SGML. Interested people not using the UNIX network were told to subscribe by sending a request to "oda-request@trigraph". The address should have been "oda-request@trigraph.uucp". Willard McCarty mccarty@utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 28 February 1988, 12:47:03 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: More on computer scientists and SNOBOL (83 lines) ---------------------------- From Joe Giampapa This note is in response to Richard Giordano's note, "Computer scientists and SNOBOL". He made a couple of points which I would not agree with. Part of Giordano's argument was as follows: Who among us writes thousands of lines of code anyway? That sort of thing is developed by teams, teams that are managed. The selection of a programming language in a team effort has much more to do with management decisions and concerns than it has to do with the intrinsic merits of this or that particular language. This explains, in part, why there are so many FORTRAN and COBOL shops around. Computer scientists, and their opinions, usually count for little or nothing in this equation. I do not see the connection between the "thousands of lines of code" and the "teams that are managed" statements. Thousands of lines of code could be written by one individual, or written by a team. Even if written by a team, it does not change the problem of a large program's readability and manageability, as embodied by that language. The criteria by which programming languages are selected, I agree, are not always reduced to the concerns of an optimal language. Future system support, the availability of coders and implementation of a language on a system, and the cost of maintaining such a system are important managerial concerns. However, it is ridiculous to state that in a way which factors out the opinions of computer scientists (or, pragmatically, the program coders). There is no way a manager can make effective project decisions without computer know-how. Neither is it intelligent to expect cost-effective work from programmers who have to work with a language which was chosen without their concerns in mind. Managers and programmers have to work together in the best interests of the project -- not in the mutually exclusive interest of one side. It disappoints me to feel I have to make such an obvious claim. "This explains, in part, why there are so many FORTRAN and COBOL shops around." I do not know much about COBOL, but I know that FORTRAN is around because it has had support of magnitude unrivaled by any other language. Most user libraries for scientific computing were written and maintained in FORTRAN, and FORTRAN is the unrivaled best optimizing compiler language. It makes no sense to rewrite everything in C (which was designed for writing programmer- optimized code). Finally, I would like to look at Giordano's closing paragraph: I do have an objection to Amsler's implicit message that computer scientists know best. They don't, but that's a different story... It is good that HUMANIST discussions express the author's emotional involvement in his/her side. However, we should be a little more conscious of when our emotions overtake our arguments and have no bearing on the matter. Whether Rich Giordano thought that Amsler had vested interest in making exaggerated claims about computer scientists, or not, or whether Amsler did in fact make those claims (I do not know --- how was the originally provocative letter phrased?) are beyond the issue of Giordano's preferred style of responding to them. If Rich Giordano wanted to direct those comments to Amsler, he should have done so directly. Not only did Giordano miss the target (Amsler replies that he is a computational linguist), but he succeeded in alienating computer scientists with his irrelevant comment. As a computer science student and professional, I cannot allow such a baseless claim to go unheeded. HUMANIST is an open forum, with the message- poster assuming full responsibility for her/his statements. It is also academic in nature, permitting the uneditted expression of opinions and insights. It would be a travesty to see it reduced to the rubble of a forum for expressing crass generalizations and to defame any profession or area of study. Joe Giampapa giampapa@brandeis.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 28 February 1988, 19:34:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Icon and Snobol (31 lines) ---------------------------- From Richard Goerwitz Richard Giordano's note admittedly exaggerates some points, as I see it, and does not fully explain the facts surrounding others. But I do understand the points he was trying to make. If taken in context - as responses to equally one-sided remarks made by previous posters - they stand as an interesting cor- rective. It therefore seemed a bit out of place to see his ideas labled as a case of emotions run wild, or as "crass generalizations" a "travesty" and various and sundry uncomplementary things. The Humanist is indeed an open forum. This, however, does not mean that we have to demean each other when we get a little out of line.... -Richard L. Goerwitz goer@sophist.uchicago.edu !ihnp4!gargoyle!sophist!goer P.S. I retain the subject heading, since this does actually come as a followup to a discussion concerning two computer languages that are well suited to the needs of Humanists, namely Icon and Snobol. ========================================================================= Date: 28 February 1988, 23:49:55 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Call for papers, 4th Waterloo New OED Conference (69 lines) ---------------------------- From Maureen Searle UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO CENTRE FOR THE NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 4TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS - CALL FOR PANELISTS INFORMATION IN TEXT October 27-28, 1988 Waterloo, Canada This year's conference will focus on ways that text stored as electronic data allows information to be restructured and extracted in response to individualized needs. For example, text databases can be used to: - expand the information potential of existing text - create and maintain new information resources - generate new print information Papers presenting original research on theoretical and applied aspects of this theme are being sought. Typical but not exclusive areas of interest include computational lexicology, computational linguistics, syntactic and semantic analysis, lexicography, grammar defined databases, lexical databases and machine-readable dictionaries and reference works. Submissions will be refereed by a program committee. Authors should send seven copies of a detailed abstract (5 to 10 double-spaced pages) by June 10, 1988 to the Committee Chairman, Dr. Gaston Gonnet, at: UW Centre for the New OED University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario Canada, N2L 3G1 Late submissions risk rejection without consideration. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by July 22, 1988. A working draft of the paper, not exceeding 15 pages, will be due by September 6, 1988 for inclusion in proceedings which will be made available at the conference. One conference session will be devoted to a panel discussion entitled MEDIUM AND MESSAGE: THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC BOOK. The Centre invites individuals who are interested in participating as panel members to submit a brief statement (approximately 150 words) expressing their major position on this topic. Please submit statements not later than June 10, 1988 to the Administrative Director, Donna Lee Berg, at the above address. Selection of panel members will be made by July 22, 1988. The Centre is interested in specialists or generalists in both academic and professional fields (including editors, publishers, software designers and distributors) who have strongly held views on the information potential of the electronic book. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Roy Byrd (IBM Corporation) Michael Lesk (Bell Communications Research) Reinhard Hartmann (Univ. of Exeter) Beth Levin (Northwestern University) Ian Lancashire (Univ. of Toronto) Richard Venezky (Univ. of Delaware) Chairman: Gaston Gonnet (Univ. of Waterloo) ========================================================================= Date: 29 February 1988, 08:55:52 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Re: Snobol comments (26 lines) ---------------------------- From Hans Joergen Marker Robert Amsler's note on Snobol made me curious as well. I don't understand what kind of tasks are so much better handled in Prolog and Lisp than in C -- so that these languages are usable for solving problems in humanities and C is not. Mind you I am asking out of ignorance. I am only experienced in a few languages, and after I have learned C, I have no intention of learning another language. I feel that anything I want to do is done very comfortably in C, especially when you make use of some of the many available libraries. Perhaps I should recommend a book: Herbert Schildt: Artificial Intelligence using C. It was that book which convinced me that AI methods might actually be of practical use anyway. ========================================================================= Date: 29 February 1988, 09:00:06 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: British natural language (21 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I believe the British Government 'natural language processing' that Grace Logan refers to may be the Prime Minister saying "the National Health Service is safe in our hands" on election, and then proceeding to dismantle it as fast as she can go. I understand a number of other governments have been doing similar research sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 29 February 1988, 09:03:15 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Public domain programs (36 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I sympathise with Dominik W. in his views on the excellent support for TeX vs. the minimal support from big companies. But mega-fan though I am of TeX, I cannot really agree with his premise that the whole system is there for the taking by the new punter. Agreed, there ARE PD versions for the PC, Atari etc, and Unix/Vax/IBM etc people can get the tape for a minimal cost; but: a) the printer drivers are NOT generically in the public domain as TeX itself is; I know Beebe etc give away their drivers, but they might not one day b) the work required to build oneself a working TeX environment is considerable, unless you spend money. I just about maintain a TeX system on our machine in conjunction with our systems programmer, and we keep our heads above water only because we support about 10 users. Just because it costs nothing to buy doesn't mean its free of maintenance charges! I'd support the suggestion that HUMANISTs out there who just want to typeset their papers and books in conventional ways spend some real cash and buy a system like Publisher and get on with what they are paid for, writing & thinking, not typesetting! I except people like Dominik whose Devanagari needs are not catered for in standard software.... sebastian rahtz ========================================================================= Date: 29 February 1988, 09:05:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Ghettoes (41 lines) ---------------------------- From Sebastian Rahtz I haven't yet had time to take up Willard's gauntlet and find out what HUMANISTs are interested in (I will have a go at it), but I did quickly see what words they use in their biographies: these are the 'interesting' words that occur more than 10 times: Philosophy 11 programming 15 database 27 Text 11 Information 16 IBM 27 medieval 11 Linguistics 16 Greek 30 YORK 11 mainframe 17 text 33 History 11 literary 18 texts 37 Hebrew 11 courses 18 French 38 Language 12 student 18 language 38 Macintosh 12 history 19 teaching 50 technology 12 VAX 21 Computer 54 Latin 12 Computers 21 English 56 concordance 13 applications 23 Humanities 58 music 13 writing 24 computers 63 German 14 teach 24 Computing 69 colleagues 15 languages 25 humanities 72 science 15 Science 26 computing 93 electronic 15 literature 26 computer 96 Doesn't prove a thing, does it? except maybe about history. Sebastian heres a *joke* for British HUMANISTs: Q. what was the catchphrase in the Egyptian telephone company privatisation? A. Tell El-Amarna ========================================================================= Date: 29 February 1988, 11:18:46 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: SGML-based markup (65 lines) ---------------------------- From George M. Logan As the supervisors of Cheryl Fraser's thesis on an SGML-based standard for encoding literary texts, we are pleased that Peter Roosen-Runge has found the thesis to be a useful treatment of this subject. He gives an accurate summary of the thesis: I recently came across a Master's Thesis which gave me a good introduction to the key ideas of SGML and what's involved in applying them to the creation of a set of tags for literary documents. An implementation in SCRIPT/VS is discussed, there's a 90-page reference manual as an appendix which gives a clear description of all the elements defined in the "standard" proposed by the author, and she's provided a sample markup and formatted output for a scene from Hamlet. As Roosen-Runge says, the thesis is now available as a Technical Report from the Department of Computing and Information Science at Queen's. We should add that it has been fed into the discussions of the ACH working group on text-encoding standards. There are also two follow-up papers. The first of these--"Generalized Markup for Literary Texts"--will appear in the next issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing. Co-authored by Cheryl and us, it offers an overview of Cheryl's work and what we take to be its significance. The second deals with two apparent problems with an SGML-based standard that were discussed in the HUMANIST exchanges that followed the November 1987 Vassar meeting on standards: (1) the fact that, whereas computer-assisted textual studies often require the maintenance of multiple views of a document's structure, SGML does not appear to be designed to easily accommodate such views; (2) the fact that an SGML-based standard would appear to entail the keyboarding of more markup than researchers are accustomed to, or are likely to accept. This second paper, co-authored by the two of us, another MSc student, and two members of Software Exoterica (which is developing an SGML parser), discusses these problems and several solutions to them. It is currently under consideration for journal publication, and is meanwhile available as a Technical Report. The reference for the Technical Reports, then, are as follows: Fraser, Cheryl, A. An Encoding Standard for Literary Documents Technical Report 88-207 Department of Computing & Information Science, Queen's University: January 1988 Barnard, David, et al. SGML-Based Markup for Literary Text: Two Problems and Some Solutions Technical Report 87-204 Department of Computing & Information Science, Queen's University: December 1987 David T. Barnard (barnard @ qucis.bitnet) George M. Logan (logang @ qucdn.bitnet) DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY 613-545-2154 Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 Canada