3.284 ideal lab; text retrieval (54)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Mon, 24 Jul 89 21:34:32 EDT


Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 284. Monday, 24 Jul 1989.


(1) Date: Sat, 22 Jul 89 18:23:30 CDT (23 lines)
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@UIUCVME>
Subject: Re: 3.247 ideal lab?

(2) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 89 09:21:28 EDT (11 lines)
From: Michael W Jennings <MWJENNIN@PUCC.bitnet>
Subject: NB Textbase; FYI 3000

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 89 18:23:30 CDT
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@UIUCVME>
Subject: Re: 3.247 ideal lab? genealogy? Nota Bene? (138)

Someone responded to the ideal lab question with suggestions concerning
grammar checkers among other tools. As a result, I swapped an empty
xt case for a copy of Grammatik III and tried it out. The results were
interesting, to say the most, and befuddling to say the least.

The most remarkable "feature" was that when analyzing Alice in Wonderland,
one of our most popular machine readable texts, Grammatik reported 1600
sentences, of which over 2500 were shorter than 14 words.

However, on a more serious note, it didn't seem to handle single quote marks
at all, though it did quite well with regular ones. After it responded that
my writing was at grade level 14 (too high for the audience I was addressing
in that instance) I fooled it into giving a result of 7, simply by having
Word Perfect replace the commas with periods.

I would love to hear others' experience with Grammatik III, since I understand
it can be a very worthwhile tool in the hands of the experienced user.

Michael S. Hart (National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts)
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------19----
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 89 09:21:28 EDT
From: Michael W Jennings <MWJENNIN@PUCC.bitnet>
Subject: NB Textbase; FYI 3000

On the subject of text bases: frequent reference has been made to Nota
Bene's text base facility. That aspect of Nota Bene is based (in slightly
modified form) on a program called FYI 3000. There is now a FYI 3000 Plus
(available from FYI Inc., P.O. Box 26481, Austin, TX 78755; (512) 346-0134).
I have found it easy to use, flexible, and fast. It is compatible with
most major word processors (I use it with WordPerfect) and costs a fraction
of Nota Bene's (scandalous) price.