12.0595 concordances -- on paper?

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Thu, 29 Apr 1999 22:58:03 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 12, No. 595.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu> (23)
Subject: Re: 12.0593 -- Concordances

[2] From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com> (3)
Subject: Re: 12.0593 need for Internet II? concordance
publishers?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 21:57:30 +0100
From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu>
Subject: Re: 12.0593 -- Concordances

Darryl Whetter writes:

> I have prepared a concordance to a recent novel and, sadly, am not
> meeting much encouragement from university and academic publishers
> listed in the MLA useful addresses.

> Could anyone recommend publishers interested in literary concordances?

The larger question might be, with the rise of digital texts and powerful
analysis tools, is there a place anymore for print concordances? Even a
work marked up with a relatively simple encoding scheme provides many more
ways of asking questions of a text than allowed by the codex format.
Furthermore, because of the growing number of works available in digital
format, one can also ask those questions across any number of axes: by
period, gender, geographic area, genre, etc. A quick search of my
university's on-line catalogue (admittedly a non-scientific sample)
reveals a regular drop in the number of concordances published over the
past 20 years: five published in 1998, six in 1997, compared with 14 in
1981 and 17 in 1980.

Mr. Whetter might have better luck marking up his text in SGML or XML and
publishing it on his university Internet site.

Dave Gants

--
David L. Gants *** Department of English *** Park Hall
 University of Georgia *** Athens, GA *** 30602-6205
    706.542.3496 (office) *** 706.542.2181 (FAX)

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 21:57:44 +0100 From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com> Subject: Re: 12.0593 need for Internet II? concordance publishers?

Now that concordances can be easily made with software packages, and electronic versions of novels,poems, etc. can be readily searched, I don't know of any publishers that want to spend money issuing concordances.

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