21.541 "anywhere you want to go"

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 541.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:01:01 +0000
         From: "Alan Corre <corre_at_uwm.edu>" <alancorre_at_uwm.edu>
         Subject: 21.538 "anywhere you want to go"

Willard, quoting Philip Smith's mention of "programming languages
developed for the humanist", prompts me to share the following. Eighteen
years ago, I published with Prentice-Hall -- the same publisher as
published Smith's comments -- a book I called "Icon Programming for
Humanists." "Icon" in this context has nothing to do with the now common
use of the word which came along subsequently, but is simply the name of a
programming language that is especially adapted to dealing with texts. I
showed in the book how Icon could be fruitfully applied to stylistics, in
particular to the rigorous procedures suggested by Anthony Kenny in his
1982 book "The Computation of Style," but there carried out manually. At
the urging of Clinton Jeffery, Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Idaho, I have embarked on a second, updated edition of this
book, which will take into account the truly amazing changes in computing
that have occurred over the past two decades. Professor Jeffery is
enthusiastically cooperating with me in this effort, which will be made
available, later this year hopefully, on the Internet without charge. He
comments in his foreword to the book that "books on text processing are
few and far between." I have also included a new chapter on working with
Unicode for non-Roman scripts, giving Russian, Tamil, and Hebrew as
examples. Humanists might want to encourage programmers to consider this
language for projects on which they embark. It is a relatively easy
language to learn, and can greatly expedite text processing. The standard
manual of the language is available on line at
                http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/lb3.htm

                        Alan D. Corre

                Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Studies
                University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

corre@uwm.edu http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/
Received on Tue Feb 12 2008 - 01:11:10 EST