From: CBS%UK.AC.RUTHERFORD.MAIL::CA.UTORONTO.UTCS.VM::POSTMSTR 14-JAN-1989 09:53:36.32 To: archive CC: Subj: Via: UK.AC.RUTHERFORD.MAIL; Sat, 14 Jan 89 9:50 GMT Received: from UKACRL by UK.AC.RL.IB (Mailer X1.25) with BSMTP id 9331; Sat, 14 Jan 89 09:50:04 GM Received: from vm.utcs.utoronto.ca by UKACRL.BITNET (Mailer X1.25) with BSMTP id 1923; Sat, 14 Jan 89 09:49:54 G Received: by UTORONTO (Mailer X1.25) id 0407; Fri, 13 Jan 89 14:46:36 EST Date: Fri, 13 Jan 89 14:46:07 EST From: "Steve Younker (Postmaster)" To: archive@UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 00:21:22 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Sterling Bjorndahl - Claremont Grad. School Subject: range of discussion on HUMANIST I appreciate the concern about HUMANIST's self-editorial policy. There is a spirit missing from HUMANIST's discussions that has been present in other discussions I have been a member of. On the other hand, I can remain a member of HUMANIST in good conscience because it does not take much time away from my other duties, which are considered by others here to be of a higher priority. Two specific examples: I was a member of the info-c discussion on ARPA (linked with the sister discussion group on usenet). This was a free-flowing discussion with frequent cries from subscribers asking submitters to control themselves. There was a great deal of redun- dancy and even inanity mixed with a few nuggets of valid and even brilliant discussion. Although I enjoyed it immensely on the whole, I had to quit because I couldn't afford that many hours of extra reading per week. After a while, the returns just weren't great enough to put up with the noise. On the other end of the editorial spectrum was the arpanet RISKS digest. A "digest" means that the moderator is also an editor. All submissions are sent to him, and he exercises editorial judgement on everything submitted. Once or twice a week, as volume dictates, the collected and edited submissions are mailed in one package to all sub- scribers, with a refreshing dash of humour added. The kind of give- and-take conversations that have been referred to can still happen in this environment, because the moderator is essentially benign unless serious redundancies and/or inanities occur. (I believe that the mod- erator was getting full credit for his work in this, and it was proba- bly a part of his job description.) Nevetheless, even so edited, the volume became more than I could deal with effectively (despite the fascinating subject matter, by the way: risks to the public from com- puters and automated systems). So although I find HUMANIST occasionally on the "dead" side, I have no trouble maintaining my subscription since it does not demand too much of my time. Discussions happen in private, and if I want to get in on them I can contact the initiator. I admit, I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more activity in HUMANIST on occasion, and I think people with issues of broad interest (such as the recent discussion on the OED) should feel free to bring these issues forward. But if HUMANIST has to err, I would rather it err on the dead side, lest I be forced to resign. Let my vote be so registered. Sterling Bjorndahl Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont Graduate School Claremont, California ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 09:25:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Jim Cerny Subject: The Dirty Dozen ... Plus??? This is just to add to the warning passed on by Stuart Hunter about Lehigh's direct experience with a virus in some publicly obtained copies of COMMAND.COM. There are apparently a number of other programs that have had work done to their genes to turn them into malignant viruses. They have come to be called "The Dirty Dozen," though there are more than a dozen. These have been described in a number of computer center newsletters in the last year or so. The most recent description I've seen was "Beware The Dirty Dozen: Software That Destroys," CAUSE/EFFECT, v. 10, n. 6, November 1987, pp. 44-45. (which is reprinted from the "Technical Update" publication at the Univ. Cincinnati Computing Center, September 1, 1987). Jim Cerny University Computing, Univ. N.H. J_CERNY@UNHH ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 09:34:18 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Dr Abigail Ann Young Subject: Discussions [34 ll, counting this one] Well, pace Sterling Bjorndahl, I don't find HUMANIST on the dead side and I don't want to! But I think I know exactly what he's talking about. Recently it seems that queries or opinions appear and then die in electronic silence. In fact, there seems in general to be less discussion now than there was a few months ago. I don't know to what to attribute this. It could reflect a need on the part of those of us who teach or provide services to students to prepare for and then deal with the demands of a new academic session. It could be that no-one has very much to say at the moment. But I have wondered recently whether we were all feeling a reluctance to say much brought on by our worthy moderator's urgings towards self-editing (with the consequent responsiblity of editing and posting a resulting conversation, if any) and our new awareness of the cost factor for the Antipodes at least. I certainly find the current "full" discussion on the details about the electronic OED interesting and a nice change, even though I had already found out a lot of it at the Waterloo conference, and I wish that I'd kept my query about the Rutgers database general now too. So I am glad that Willard has passed on what others have had to say, and I think perhaps we should try out for a bit making all discussion general. We could make use of a subject line to indicate the topic of a posting, and whether it were part of an on-going discussion, thus enabling those who need to clear their readers quickly to ignore discussions which were not of interest to them. Abigail Young Research Associate, Records of Early English Drama University of Toronto young at utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 11:14:50 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: William J. McCarthy Subject: discussions (15 lines) I would like to express my approval of the contents of the recent message about discussions on HUMANIST. Although I have no interest in scanning the turgid "flames" of the digitally deranged, it seems much more than unlikely that HUMANISTs will inundate one another with drivel; and, I am content to attempt to follow the threads of the discussions on my own. Certainly it >is< easy enough to dispatch into oblivion (I have set up a macro to just that purpose) any piece of mail in which one has no interest. As it now stands, HUMANIST seems a touch too formal. ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 14:24:09 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" Subject: CD ROMs, micro- and mainframe computing with large corpora A late contribution to the discussion provoked by Abigail Young about CDs as a medium of data distribution. [60 lines or so.] I think Dr. Young hit the nail on the head with the question "Are there people out there waiting with bated breath for the new OED on CD ROM?" Because certainly if we're not excited about the OED as a group, then we're not as a group going to be very excited about anything. Yes, I AM waiting with bated breath for an electronic OED, but I was far more excited to learn it would be available on tape than I was to hear about the CD ROM version. I like and use my PC, and I hope someday to be able to work with massive textual corpora on it, but at least for the moment I think magnetic tape is a far better medium for distribution. For one thing, I don't have a CD ROM drive, and I don't know anyone who does, except for Bob Kraft and a classicist here who has a Ibycus micro on loan but does her Greek word processing on our mainframe. Tape drives, on the other hand, will be available at any school in the country. For another, tape drives allow me to change the data -- add to it, enhance it, reduce its size -- and make another copy. CD ROM doesn't. For that reason alone, I'll wait for WORM before buying a new drive for my PC. And finally, mainframes seem to me by and large better at dealing with large quantities of data. That is changing, to be sure. But I can edit the Nibelungenlied in storage on the mainframe, and extract every occurrence of the name 'Sivrit' in a couple of seconds. My PC with its 640 Kbytes can only hold a fourth or so of the Nibelungenlied in RAM at a time. To be sure, a micro-Ibycus could also find all the occurrences of 'Sivrit' in a few seconds -- if the Nibelungenlied were on a CD ROM. But it's not, and there aren't enough Germanic philologists in the country to make it economically feasible to make one. Nor do I WANT a frozen, unalterable text of the Nibelungenlied. I want to be able to index it, to add parsing information or scansions to the file so I can search on them, and so on. Not to mention the need to correct typos in the transcription and add manuscript variants. For all this, we need erasable media, not CD ROMs. Magnetic tapes do have the drawback, for some users, that they are typically readable only on mainframes. (There are PC-based 9-track tape drives, but they aren't real common.) And many humanists don't like working on mainframes. Even for those users, however, the local academic computing center should be, and almost always is, in a position to read the tape and help the user download the data to a microcomputer. No, it's not always easy. And no, it's not always fast. A megabyte an hour or so. But the chances are good the academic computer center knows how to do it, and does it regularly. All the ones I've ever known as a user or staff member do. There may be centers that do NOT provide this kind of service, although I have never seen one and never heard of one. But if they exist, those centers should be DRIVEN to provide support for humanities computing, support for microcomputing, and support for data exchange between mainframes and micros. If they are not providing these services, they are not doing their job. Given the kind of support computer centers ought to be providing for humanist users, and given the kind of flexible text humanistic work seems to need, I think CD ROMs look much less promising as a means of data distribution than WORM disks and magnetic tape, and in some cases floppy disks. All of which is just one user's opinion. -Michael Sperberg-McQueen University of Illinois at Chicago (U18189 at UICVM) ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 14:26:50 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Marshall Gilliland Subject: Subject line comments (25 lines) Oh, my, the HUMANIST subject lines may get long. Now, in addition to the honest-to-goodness subject, and to the number of lines in the message, Abigail Young suggests "we could make use of a subject line to indicate the topic of a posting, and whether it were part of an on-going discussion, thus enabling those who need to clear their readers quickly to ignore discussions which were not of interest to them." Maybe we serious, dull writers can use such an augmented subject line as a place to pun? But woe is me for, alas, my mailer does not accept long subject lines. Can it be that some people will have to read the beginning of the message to learn what we want to ignore? Will we be like this lady: Lizzi Borden took an axe And plunged it deep into the VAX Don't you envy people who Do all the things you want to do? (Thanks to Jerry Whitnell in California for the ditty.) Maybe we'll relax a bit as our marking gets frantic and we hear the carols of the season. Marshall Gilliland U of Saskatchewan ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 15:55:42 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: "James H. Coombs" Subject: Concordance for Mac Does anyone know of concordance programs for the Mac? Thanks. --Jim ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 15:58:31 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" Subject: Text encoding guidelines -- progress report (225 lines) A followup on the current status of the ACH effort to formulate guidelines for text encoding practices. ****************************************************************** * NOTE: The following encoding conventions have been used to * * represent French accents throughout this message: * * * * To Represent Accents -- Pour la representation des accents * * / acute accent - accent aigu * * ` grave accent - accent grave * * * * The accent codes are typed Les codes pour les accents se * * AFTER the letter, and are trouvent APRES la lettre qu'ils * * used with both upper and modifient, et s'utilisent avec * * lower case letters. les majuscules aussi bien que * * les minuscules. * ****************************************************************** On November 12 and 13, 1987, 31 representatives of professional societies, universities, and text archives met to consider the possibility of developing a set of guidelines for the encoding of texts for literary, linguistic, and historical research. The meeting was called by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The list of participants is appended to this document. The participants heartily endorsed the idea of developing encoding guidelines. In order to guide such development, they agreed on the following principles: The Preparation of Re/daction des directives Text Encoding Guidelines pour le codage des textes Pougheepsie, New York 13 November 1987 1. The guidelines are intended 1. Le but des directives est de cre/er to provide a standard format un format standard pour l'e/change for data interchange in des donne/es utilise/es pour la humanities research. recherche dans les humanite/s. 2. The guidelines are also 2. Les directives sugge/reront intended to suggest principles e/galement des principes pour for the encoding of texts l'enregistrement des textes in the same format. destine/s a` utiliser ce format. 3. The directives should 3. Les directives devraient a. define a recommended a. de/finir une syntaxe recommande/e syntax for the format pour exprimer le format, b. define a metalanguage b. de/finir un me/ta-langage for the description de/crivant les syste`mes de of text-encoding schemes, codage des textes, c. describe the new format c. de/crire par le moyen de ce and representative me/talangage, aussi bien qu'en existing schemes both in prose, le nouveau syste`me de that metalanguage and codage aussi bien qu'un choix in prose. repre/sentatif de syste`mes de/ja` en vigueur. 4. The guidelines should 4. Les directives devraient proposer propose sets of coding des syste`mes de codage utilisables conventions suited for pour un large e/ventail various applications. d'applications. 5. The guidelines should 5. Sera incluse dans les directives include a minimal set of l'e/nonciation d'un syste`me de conventions for encoding codage minimum, pour guider new texts in the format. l'enregistrement de nouveaux textes conforme/ment au format propose/. 6. The guidelines are to be 6. Le travail d'e/laboration des drafted by committees on: directives sera confie/ a` quatre comite/s centre/s sur les sujets suivants: a. text documentation a. la documentation des textes, b. text representation b. la repre/sentation des textes, c. text interpretation c. l'analyse et l'interpre/tation and analysis des textes d. metalanguage definition d. la de/finition du me/talangage et and description of son utilisation pour de/crire le existing and proposed nouveau syste`me aussi bien que schemes ceux qui existent de/ja`. co-ordinated by a steering Ce travail sera coordonne/ par un committee of representatives comite/ d'organisation ou` of the principal sie`geront des repre/sentants des sponsoring organizations. principales associations qui soutiennent cet effort. 7. Compatibility with existing 7. Dans la mesure du possible, le standards will be maintained nouveau syste`me sera compatible as far as possible. avec les syste`mes de codage existants. 8. A number of large text 8. Des repre/sentants de plusieurs archives have agreed in grandes archives de textes en form principle to support the lisible par machine acceptent en guidelines in their function principe d'utiliser les directives as an interchange format. en tant que description des formats We encourage funding agencies pour l'e/change de leurs donne/es. to support development of Nous encourageons les organismes tools to facilitate this qui fournissent des fonds pour la interchange. recherche de soutenir le de/veloppement de ce qui est ne/cessaire pour faciliter cela. 9. Conversion of existing 9. En convertissant des textes machine-readable texts to lisibles par machine de/ja` the new format involves the existants, on remplacera translation of their automatiquement leur codage actuel conventions into the syntax par ce qui est ne/cessaire pour les of the new format. No rendre conformes au format nouveau. requirements will be made for Nul n'exigera l'ajout the addition of information d'informations qui ne sont pas not already coded in the de/ja` repre/sente/es dans ces texts. textes. (trad. P. A. Fortier) ****************** The further organization and drafting of the guidelines will be supervised by a steering committee selected by the three sponsoring organizations: ACH (the Association for Computers and the Humanities), ACL (the Association for Computational Linguistics), and ALLC (the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing). Drafts of the guidelines will be submitted for comment to an editorial committee with representatives of all participating organizations (in addition to the sponsors, thus far: the Modern Language Association, the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval, and the Association of American Publishers; the following groups have indicated interest informally but have not yet formally pledged participation, in most cases pending a foraml vote: the Linguistic Society of America, the Association for Documentary Editing, the American Philological Association. The American Anthropological Association, plus several organizations within Europe, are now being asked to consider participation. The interchange format defined by the guidelines is expected to be compatible with the Standard Generalized Markup Language defined by ISO 8859, if that proves compatible with the needs of research. The needs of specialized research interests will be addressed wherever it proves possible to find interested groups or individuals to do the necessary work and achieve the necessary consensus. Formation of specific working groups will be announced later; in the meantime, those interested in working on specific problems are invited to contact either Dr. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of Illinois at Chicago (M/C 135), P.O. Box 6998, Chicago IL 60680 (on Bitnet: U18189 at UICVM), or Prof. Nancy Ide, Dept. of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY 12601 (on Bitnet: IDE at VASSAR). - N.I., C.M.S-McQ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ List of Participants NOTE: Association names are given following the names of their representatives at this meeting. Helen Aguera, National Endowment for the Humanities Robert A. Amsler, Bell Communications Research David T. Barnard, Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen's University, Ontario Lou Burnard, Oxford Text Archive Roy Byrd, IBM Research Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa David Chestnutt (Assoc. for Documentary Editing, American Historical Assoc.), Department of History, University of South Carolina Yaacov Choueka (Academy of the Hebrew Language), Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University Jacques Dendien, Institut National de la Langue Francaise Paul A. Fortier, Department of Romance Languages, University of Manitoba Thomas Hickey, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Susan Hockey (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), Oxford University Computing Service Nancy M. Ide (Association for Computers and the Humanities), Department of Computer Science, Vassar College Stig Johansson, International Computer Archive of Modern English, University of Oslo Randall Jones (Modern Language Association), Humanities Research Computing Center, Brigham Young University Robert Kraft, Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania Ian Lancashire, Center for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto D. Terence Langendoen (Linguistic Society of America), Graduate Center, City University of New York Charles (Jack) Meyers, National Endowment for the Humanities Junichi Nakamura, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kyoto University Wilhelm Ott, Universitaet Tuebingen Eugenio Picchi, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa Carol Risher (American Association of Publishers), American Association of Publishers, Inc. Jane Rosenberg, National Endowment for the Humanities Jean Schumacher, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes, Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve J. Penny Small (American Philological Association), U.S. Center for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Rutgers University C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of Illinois at Chicago Paul Tombeur, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes, Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium Frank Tompa, New Oxford English Dictionary Project, University of Waterloo Donald E. Walker (Association for Computational Linguistics), Bell Communications Research Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa, Italy [end of message] ========================================================================= Date: 1 December 1987, 16:22:58 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Dr Abigail Ann Young Re: CD-ROMs & other media; on-going [body of message 26 ll inclusive] (Was that too long, Marshall?) Does anyone have any information on WORM drives? A non-HUMANIST colleague told me he had heard about them at an IBM-sponsored conference and that they were the best thing since sliced bread, basically. I've also heard that a disk for an IBM WORM drive would be capable of being written to only once, which would certainly make such a disk only slightly more useful than a CD-ROM, and considerably less useful than a magnetic tape. I am always suspicious of new devices which will revolutionize my life and save me time, trouble, etc. I think it is because I tended to believe the Popular Science/Mechanics picture of the future when I was a child. But a WORM drive & disk capable of multiple disk writes as well as reads sounds very, very appealing. Abigail Ann Young Research Associate, Records of Early English Drama University of Toronto young at utorepas ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 00:17:29 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: "James H. Coombs" Subject: Sonar; Mac; concordance vs. retrieval (54 lines) I asked about concordance programs for the Mac. Someone sent me the review of Sonar and a couple of others have mentioned it. The review does not say anything about concording texts with Sonar, however. I have never used one of these retrieval programs. I have used WatCon and have written a concordance program for the IBM PC (for multiple versions of the same text). IS Sonar appropriate for generating concordances? concordances that will be printed and distributed? Does it properly handle lines of poetry, for instance? and give columns of lines with locations? I assume that WordCruncher from BYU can do such, since it is a descendent of a concording program (unless there is an equivocation on "concord" here, and please let us all know if there is). I am in the process of designing a retrieval engine and browser for the American Heritage Dictionary. When I think of retrieval programs, I think of inverted indices, hash tables, and the like. "Use this information to go find X and then let's Y it." That, to me, is a typical retrieval action, and the access is typically random. Concording, however, at least in the traditional sense, is sequential and exhaustive. One COULD use a retrieval application to concord a text, but it would be very inefficient and would probably require additional programming anyway. One would have to have a means to call the retrieval engine iteratively for every word in the text as well as the means to format and write the results someplace. Are WordCruncher and Sonar dual applications? In order to index, one has to perform much of the same processing as is required for concording (process sequentially and exhaustively, split words out of lines, stop words, lemmatize?, cross reference (See also xxx)?). Well, some of the routines are the same anyway, at least to the extent that the developer of one type of application would have a start on developing the other. It begins to sound like integrated systems a la Symphony vs. 1-2-3. Does the system that offers both really do both jobs well? Or, first I guess, are there systems that offer both? --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 12:12:08 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Bob Kraft Subject: CD-ROM & WORM [88 lines] The recent observations by Abigail Young and Michael Sperberg-McQueen on CD-ROM and WORM technologies call for some comment from the "pro" (and experienced) side. I hope to keep them brief, just to pinpoint some of the issues. Michael's comments seemed to me to miss many crucial points, and did not reflect the attitudes or situation of numerous people with whom I am in regular contact. 1. The difference between CD-ROM and WORM for this discussion is negligible, as Abigail suspected. Right now, WORM drives are more expensive and less tested publicly, but cheaper to produce a single disk. But once you have that single WORM disk, which currently costs about $65, there is no price advantage to making multiple copies (50 copies would cost $3250). With the CD-ROM, it might cost $3000 to master but each additional copy would cost very little (perhaps $ 7 each for 100). Thus it would be much cheaper to make 100 copies of a CD-ROM than 100 copies of a WORM disk at present. And the CD-ROM holds more than twice as much as the WORM disks with which we are working. So WORM is fine for limited production or in-house purposes, CD-ROM is better for larger distribution, etc. Neither can be changed once they are mastered, although WORM can be mastered in stages, while CD-ROM is a once for all mastering process. 2. Are people anxiously waiting for data distributed on CD-ROM? In my experience, YES. We have many advance orders for the CCAT CD-ROM, and more inquiries. Ted Brunner can report on the TLG experience. What sorts of people are asking? Obviously, IBYCUS SC owners (about 130 machines) who are set up to use CD-ROM as part of the package; Librarians, who need massive amounts of data in a bibliographically controlled context (static is good, in this setting!); the mass of individual scholars/students who are not in a tape-oriented environment such as Michael describes (his experience is not at all typical, even at the ideal level, of the majority of people with whom I am in contact -- people in small colleges, seminaries, or operating individually, with no access to a real mainframe or effective consultation). 3. What is attractive to these inquirers? Several fairly obvious things. (1) Amount of material available -- e.g. all of Greek literature through the 6th century on the TLG disk! (2) Price of the material (on tape, the TLG data cost over $4000; on CD-ROM, it is about 10% of that) (3) Convenience of storage, access, etc. -- I would rather download from a CD-ROM than from a tape drive, any day. It is the old roll vs codex issue once again (microfilm vs microfiche, etc.). (4) Quality control -- what is on the CD-ROM may have errors, but at least they can be identified and controlled (and corrected in a later release); I don't have to wonder whether my dynamic file has become corrupted (as happens more than I want to admit). (5) Speed of access to large bodies of data -- even if the programs are not yet in place and it will take 20 times as long to search a large CD-ROM file on the IBM than on IBYCUS, it is at least possible to do the search (or to search multiple files, in various configurations), which is extremely difficult in any other manner short of a dedicated mini. I am rambling and apologize. Much more needs to be said, but I need to finish preparing ID tables for the CCAT CD-ROM if it is to be mastered by the end of the year! Perhaps it would not be feasible economically to put the Nibelungenlied on its own CD-ROM, but to have it as a small part of a CD-ROM with all sorts of other texts is what we are talking about! That is not only feasible, but it seems to me highly desirable, IBYCUS or not. And I can still download what I want to edit, or manipulate, etc. I lose none of that capability. But I gain by having the original fixed at hand for comparison, etc. Libraries will rapidly be CD-ROM centered, and that is as it ought to be. Hopefully computer centers will not be bypassed by this exciting and useful development! Bob Kraft ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 14:41:59 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Jim Cerny Subject: Summary of responses on KJV Bible for Macintosh (incl. [152 lines] Thanks to everyone who responded to my recent inquiry about the availability of the King James Version of the Bible for the Apple Macintosh. I've tried to acknowledge or quote from all the responses (as of 01-Dec) in the summary that follows. ====================================================================== John J. Hughes (XB.J24@STANFORD) had the most definitive answer, reflecting no doubt the research for his book "Bits Bytes and Bible Studies". Robin C. Cover (ZRCC1001@SMUVM1) referenced this book and Marshall Gilliland (GILLILAND@SASK) and Tim Seid (ST401742@BROWNVM) mentioned sources that Hughes lists. Hughes wrote: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are several companies that sell King James Versions of the Bible for Macintoshes. Here are their names, addresses, and so forth. The first program is reviewed in detail in chapter 3 of BITS, BYTES, & BIBLICAL STUDIES (Zondervan, 1987). THE WORD Processor Bible Research Systems 2013 Wells Branch Parkway, Suite 304 Austin, TX 78728 (512) 251-7541 $199.95 Requires 512K; includes menu-driven concording program CP/M version available for Kaypros. MacBible Encycloware 715 Washington St. Ayden, NC 28513 (919) 746-3589 $169 128K; text files that may be read by MacWrite and Microsoft Word. MacScripture Medina Software P.O. Box 1917 Longwood, FL 32750-1917 (305) 281-1557 $119.95 128K; text files designed to be used with MacWrite. ======================================================================= Marshall Gilliland (GILLILAND@SASK) pointed to a very unexpected source, i.e., one of the DECUS (DEC Users Society) tapes. We are an active VAX/VMS site and we did indeed have the tape. It is on VAX System SIG Symposium tape VAX86D (from the Fall 86 DECUS meeting in San Francisco). In uncompressed form the files take about 9000 VAX disk blocks (roughly 5 MB). It is all in upper case. Presumably could be downloaded to a PC, but don't think I will attempt that! Gilliland wrote, in part: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have VAX equipment there and get DECUS tapes then ask one of your systems people for the copy of the ascii text of the KJ Bible that was on a DECUS tape not too long ago (I think in 1987). Marshall Gilliland English Dept. U. of Saskatchewan ======================================================================= Tim Seid (ST401742@BROWNVM) pointed me to CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) and Bob Kraft (KRAFT@PENNDRLN) from CCAT also responded. Bob Kraft also sent me several files about CCAT and its services and I've tacked CCAT's info-file at the end of this summary ... "old hands" may be aware of CCAT's electronic newsletter, ONLINE NOTES, but it was new to me and their info-file tells how to subscribe. Bob Kraft wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I have not seen my MAC person (Jay Treat) since your inquiry about the KJV arrived, but I am reasonably sure that it is already available from CCAT for the MAC, or will be very soon. We have been distributing the KJV and RSV (along with the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible) to IBM types for over a year now, and all these materials will be on our soon to be released CD-ROM. Most of it has been ported to the MAC as well. I will send you an order form and other information separately. Bob Kraft ======================================================================= Ronald de Sousa (DESOUS@UTORONTO) mentioned the possibility of using DIALOG services. de Sousa wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- You'll probably get some satisfactory answers, but in the meantime I wonder whether you you that the cheap after-hours service of DIALOG Info Services, called "Knowledge Index", has the King James full text on line, and can be searched using the search options of that service. I seem to recall that for $200 you'd get about 8 hourse of search time -- quite enough for a limited project. Of course, the same is available on DIALOG itself, with somewhat more sophisticated options.. ======================================================================= Roger Hare (R.J.HARE@EDINBURGH.AC.UK) responded from JANET that Catspaw Inc. has the King James Bible. They specialize in supporting PC-based implementations of SNOBOL and related products, as I recall. Roger Hare wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Catspaw do a version of the King james Bible for 50 dollars. My catalogue dosen't say what machine it's for, but if you have access to a maniframe perhaps you could get it onto your Macintosh via file transfers? their address is: Catspaw Inc. PO Box 1123 Salida Colarado 81201 USA. Roger Hare. ======================================================================= Finally, Chuck Bush (ECHUCK@BYUADMIN) mentioned that they have the King James Bible at the Humanities Research Center at Brigham Young University and I presume he could supply more details. Chuck Bush wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- At BYU we do have the text of the King James Bible in machine readable form. The original data is on a mainframe, but we have downloaded it to PC disks etc. for those who have ordered it in other forms. I have a copy of it on a Macintosh Bernoulli cartridge from which it would be relatively easy to copy it to some other Macintosh medium--even floppies. However, this is just the TEXT. There isn't any software to access it conveniently. Sonar is the only text retrieval software I know of for the Macintosh and I don't think it would be very satisfactory. For one thing, it couldn't give you chapter and verse references. Chuck Bush Humanities Research Center Brigham Young University ======================================================================= Interested HUMANISTs should also consult the guide to external services of the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT), Univ. of Pennsylvania, available from Jack Abercrombie (JACKA@PENNDRLS.BITNET) ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 20:29:00 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Vox populi (46 lines) Dear Colleagues: My thanks to the several people who offered their views on the conversational style of HUMANIST. The majority of speakers have clearly voiced a preference for a somewhat more open manner of conversational exchange than has been the rule so far. For what it's worth, I welcome this change without reservation, since HUMANIST is by design ruled chiefly by its members rather than by its editor. Until an absolutely foolproof method of screening out junk mail is found, I will continue to have all submissions to HUMANIST sent first to me and will forward the ones of human origin to the membership. This means very little work for a very large improvement in the quality of the environment. One of the interesting (but, I guess, not surpising) characteristics of HUMANIST is the number of members who never say anything -- yet continue to put up with the large volume of mail. I imply no criticism whatsoever, for there are many noble and practical reasons for remaining silent. Nevertheless, I suspect that some members may occasionally have something to say but wonder if what they have to say is worthy. In general the advice I follow is, say it and see what happens. One possibility for the diffident is to send in a contribution with a note attached asking my advice, for whatever it's worth. Please let me know if anything about HUMANIST bothers you or otherwise seems to need improvement. The ListServ software (written and maintained on a voluntary basis by a remarkable person who lives in Paris) we cannot fundamentally alter. It has certain characteristics that some may consider flaws but that seem to me merely features to be exploited in the best possible way. Locally HUMANIST is supported by my Centre and by the good will of our Computing Services, i.e., by two busy people. There's not much that can be done given these resources, but some changes can be made without much effort -- like the screening of junk mail. In short, lead on! Yours, W.M. _________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto / 14th floor, Robarts Library / 130 St. George St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5 / (416) 978-4238 / mccarty@utorepas.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 22:53:10 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: Sebastian Rahtz Heres one for the eager punters; a colleague of mine wants to study the New Kingdom El-Amarna literature (Egypt, mid 14th C BC). Anybody care to say if someone has already typed in such stuff onto the computer? apologies if its obvious... sebastian rahtz computer science university southampton uk ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 23:23:34 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributor: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" Subject: CD ROMs, mainframes Many thanks to Bob Kraft for his cogent remarks about CD ROMs. I seem to have given a rather scrooge-like impression in my most recent posting about CD ROMs and PCs, which does not reflect my positive opinion of PCs. Yes, CD ROMs are ideal for certain kinds of data distribution, especially for (a) stable data and (b) large numbers of recipients. For humanistic research applications with those characteristics, they are also obviously good ideas. WORM disks, or better yet eraseable mass storage devices, would make many of the same advantages available for non-static data and small numbers of recipients. But neither description fits all research fields. I am less convinced that institutional support for faculty use of mainframes and microcomputers is untypical in North America. This is an empirical question, and I would like to put it up for discussion: what is the situation at the sites represented on HUMANIST with regard to: (a) support for humanities computing formally provided by the institution via centralized or specialized facilities, (b) faculty-student computing on mainframes or minis (c) institutional support for microcomputing (d) institutional support for mainframe-micro data transfer. It is possible that Bob Kraft is right and my experience is untypical. But it seems also possible that Penn and CCAT get so much business from people without mainframe access because those who do have local computer centers get their help locally. It would be useful, I think, for all of us if we could get some idea of the facts in this area. The ACH Special Interest Group for Humanities Computing Resources (the sponsor of HUMANIST) did plan once to distribute a questionnaire to gather this information but the final questionnaire design seems to have been delayed, so let's caucus informally now. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago ========================================================================= Date: 2 December 1987, 23:34:33 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Electronic OED -- for the blind? Contributor: Norman Zacour I have a blind, computerized friend, a professor of English and a professional writer, who got very excited when I passed on to him the recent messages from HUMANISTS about plans for making the OED available in electronic form. He had visions - no joke intended - of consulting it through his speech synthesizer on his PC. His enthusiasm was dampened by the planned use of colour to display certain types of information. Does anyone happen to know if the OED has any plans for handicapped users? I suppose that there are still architects who design monumental buildings without ramps for wheelchairs, but perhaps... ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 09:55:14 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: Robin C. Cover From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Al-Amarna Correspondence (in MRT format) [96 lines] Sebastian Rahtz asked whether the El-Amarna letters exist in digitized format somewhere. I doubt whether many HUMANISTS are interested in west-semitized Akkadian texts, but this query (and its answer) provides an opportunity to tell a sad and familiar tale...and perhaps an opportunity for someone to come forward with better news than I have to tell... The good news (for our assyriologist friend in the UK) is that Knudtzon's edition of the El-Amarna letters is in machine-readable format. I have used the massive printed "concordances" (two tomes, each about 7 inches thick). These printouts originated at UCLA, so the best bet is to contact Giorgio Buccellati at the department of Near Eastern Studies, who might make tapes or diskettes available. UCLA has a growing corpus of MRT material for the ancient Near East, and in time it will be available publically as part of Buccellati's hypermedia project for Mesopotamia (Computer-Aided Analysis of Mesopotamian Materials); some materials are currently available from Undena, and Buccellati passed out sample diskettes of digitized Eblaite texts at AOS. The sad tale I mentioned earlier is as follows: Du Cerf (a Paris publisher) recently released a superb volume in its series Litteratures anciennes du Proche-Orient on the El-Amarna letters. Its author/translator is William Moran of Harvard University, recognized as a (probably THE) leading Amarna scholar, who has been putting together this polished volume over the past 30-odd years. His translations are based upon extensive museum collations of the tablets, together with restorations that can be made only by someone so familiar with the "idioms" of international diplomacy (in the 14th century B.C.E) as Professor Moran is. So, the MRT edition we *REALLY* want is Moran's, not the 1915 edition of Knudtzon. But you won't find it published on diskette with this Du Cerf volume (which does not even have transliterated original text). According to the publishers, it would not be cost-effective to publish the original text on paper, and as for a MRT edition of the text....well... Shortsightedness like this has to stop, but who is responsible for "stopping it?" A single individual (as in this case, Moran) probably can do very little to force publishers to change their ways. But how about collective bargaining....we publish such scholarly materials ONLY with publishers that are sensitive about the future of scholarship, and about the precious treasure we have in ancient literature. This means placing premium value on original texts in machine-readable form -- only thus are they truly useful and accessible to modern scholarship -- and making these texts available in the public domain. I suspect that this problem is more acute for orientalists than for classicists and other humanities-literary subspecialty areas; we have special orthographies and printing problems which are expensive and demanding. But my suggestion is that we must encourage and demand higher standards of cooperation from publishers such that valuable (priceless!) human efforts are not lost on a Macintosh diskette after it passes from the departmental secretary or word-processing pool to the publisher. Does anyone else share this point of view? Am I too idealistic? While I am in a lament mode, I might as well refer to another problem that needs attention: the problem of coding standards. There are several efforts underway internationally to "encode" ancient Near Eastern texts in transliteration (Toronto - RIM; UCLA; Rome; Helsinki; etc), but to my knowledge there are no agreed-upon standards. In the case of purely alphabetic scripts, the problem is frustrating but not fatal, since we can use consistent-changes programs to standardize the data for archiving. In the case of syllabic (logographic; heiroglyphic) scripts -- Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Egyptian -- the plethora of transliteration schemes is more problematic. No-one sends this kind of data with an SGML prologue, so the best we can hope is that the encoding is consistent and that we can unravel the format codes. If anyone knows about efforts to introduce standards for transliteration and format-coding, would you kindly let me know? I understand that the committee for encoding standards (Nancy Ide; Michael Sperberg-McQueen) recently funded by NEH will not initially address the needs of orientalists. If there are other orientalists "out there" on the HUMANIST reader list -- should we organize ourselves? Apologies to all if this is arcane, recondite or just downright boring. I'd like to know if anyone out there shares some of my frustrations, or sees solutions. Professor Robin C. Cover 3909 Swiss Avenue Dallas, TX 75204 (214) 296-1783 ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 09:58:21 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: Brendan O'Flaherty From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia Can anyone tell me if e-mail to the Antipodes (ie Australia) has a charge? and if so who pays---the sender if outside Australia or the Receipient? Thanks in advance. ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 13:36:52 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) on CD-ROM The following has been contributed by Theodore Brunner, Director of the TLG Project, from a memo circulated to all TLG customers. Anyone wishing to arrange for a license agreement should contact Professor Brunner, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717 U.S.A., telephone: (714) 856-7031, e-mail: TLG@UCIVMSA.bitnet. The license per CD-ROM , including a copy of the printed TLG Canon, is not expensive: ini- tial registration fee (plus first year fee) is $200 to institu- tions and $120 to individuals; annual fee $100 to institutions, $60 to individuals; optional one-time payment for 5 years $500 to institutions, $300 to individuals. (All prices are in US $.) _________________________________________________________________ TLG CD-ROM CUSTOMERS: We have been receiving numerous questions related to TLG CD ROM dissemination plans and policies; here is miscellaneous informa- tion on these subjects: l. To date, the TLG has produced two CD ROMs, disk "A" and disk "B". Disk "A" contains approximately 27 mlllion words of TLG text, as well as an electronic version of the TLG Canon. Disk "B" contains the same 27 million words of text, the TLG, and an Index to the TLG texts on the CD ROM. Disk "A" also contains miscellaneous non-TLG materials, including some Latin, Coptic, and Hebrew texts, some epigraphical materials, as well as portions of the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. The non-TLG materials were included on TLG CD ROM "A" for one reason only: this disk was produced (as was CD ROM "B") primarily for experimental purposes, i.e., to aid in the development of software resources designed to enhance utilization of the (relatively new) CD ROM data storage medium. Neither disk "A" nor disk "B" reflects the High Sierra format standard (established after both of these CD ROMs were produced. 2. In short order, the TLG will release a new CD ROM, disk "C". This disk will contain approximately 41.5 million words of TLG text, an index to this text material, and the TLG Canon. Individuals and institutions already holding license to "A" or "B" disks are entitled to receive "C" disks free of charge. This (as provided for in the license agreement governing use of TLG ROMs) will be on an exchange basis, i.e., disks previously issued by the TLG must be returned to the TLG prior to the issuance of a "C" disk. TLG LICENSEES SHOULD NOT RETURN THEIR "A" OR "B" DISKS UNTIL DISK "C" IS OFFICIALLY RELEASED. [Notice will appear on HUMANIST when disk "C" is ready.] 3. Questions have been raised about the absence of non-TLG material on the "C" disk. The TLG controls and licenses only its own materials, and license agreements previously executed pertain to the TLG materials on the disks only. Current TLG CD ROM licensees may, of course, continue to use their ("A" or "B") disks throughout the course of their license period; they will not be issued "C" disks, however, until they have returned their earlier CD ROM versions to the TLG. It is the case, however, that the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) will be releasing its own CD ROM in the very near future; this disk will contain Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, and epigraphical materials, as well as a significant portion of the Duke papyrological data bank. It can be assumed that individuals and institutions desirous of these materials can make arrangements with PHI to gain access to them on a PHI disk. Further informa- tion on this subject can be obtained by contacting John Gleason, Packard Humanities Institute, P.0. Box 1330 Los Altos, CA 94022 U.S.A. 4. We have received numerous requests for technical documenta- tion related to the forthcoming TLG CD ROM "C". The internal organization of the text files and of the I.D. table files will be identical to the organization of these files on TLG CD ROM "A". The file directory and author table will be reorganized to reflect the High Sierra standard. More detailed documentation is currently being prepared and should be ready for distribution in the near future. Theodore F. Brunner, Director November 8, 1987 _________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 15:00:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Enlightening the publishers, encoding Semitic (65 lines) Three cheers for Robin Cover's idea of group pressure to bring publishers to their senses regarding the preservation and distribution of machine-readable materials. Some publishers, to their credit, are already alert to the issues involved--or so say people who should know. But there are still an awful lot of them out there who behave the way Renaissance printers did with Carolingian manuscripts: mark it up, print it, and throw it out. Anything we can do to preserve the fruits of scholarly labors, we should do. It would also be useful to have a better developed system of text archives in North America -- either a network of regional or discipline-based archives, or one central archive that would take anything (the way Oxford does). The latter would be appealing because fewer texts might fall through cracks in the system, but specialized collections would remain important because they can do more intensive work on their holdings, the way Penn's CCAT does. A central North American text archive, acting in concert with the European archives, might also be in a position to help exert the kind of group pressure on publishers that Robin Cover suggests. Making the publisher's texts usable, by documenting as far as possible the usual systems of typesetting codes found in the publishing industry, is one goal of the ACH/ACL/ALLC initiative for text-encoding guidelines. (That goal is not wholly explicit in the final document I posted here a couple of days ago, but it was discussed at length during the planning meeting at Vassar and clearly is important to a lot of people.) The consensus of the planners at Vassar was also that transliteration practices, and conventions for the encoding of character sets, should at least be documented as far as possible in the guidelines. Many participants were leery of making specific recommendations for the representation of specific characters, since local hardware features and requirements can vary so widely. Nevertheless, the experts present agreed that it would not be insuperably difficult to provide adequate documentation for the encoding of scripts which, like Semitic scripts, provide special challenges to most commonly available hardware. That means that the guidelines can and should contain full information on practices for encoding texts of interest to Orientalists--if the Orientalists will document their existing practices. If they can also agree on common recommendations for future work, that consensus can and should also be documented. The same goes for any and all other specialized interests. These guidelines will belong to the humanities computing community as a whole, and I hope the community will work together to make them as complete and useful as we can. Again, I reiterate the invitation: anyone interested in helping formulate the guidelines, either in general or with respect to some specific question (e.g. the encoding of Akkadian, or the encoding of numismatic materials, or the encoding of manuscript variants, or the prosodic transcription of oral texts, or the encoding of hypertext materials, or ...), should please contact Nancy Ide or myself. This invitation will be periodically renewed, as details for the formal arrangement of the drafting committees are set, but if you let us know now, we will have a better idea of how much interest there is, and what kinds of special problems are on people's minds. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago P.S. The opinions here expressed are as always mine, not necessarily those of my employer, or the ACH, or the guidelines steering committee. ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 19:16:39 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: David Nash From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia (24 lines) E-mail involving ACSNet (Australia, through the international gateways, or even domestically between sites I think) has a charge for the Australian end (whether sender or receiver). It was something like 10c/message plus 2c/line about a year ago. Apparently many institutions do not (yet?) pass on the charge to individual users. The official position could presumably be got from postmaster@munnari.oz, i.e. David Nash Center for Cognitive Science 20B-225 MIT Cambridge MA 02139 ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 19:20:14 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: Laine Ruus From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: Archives (75 lines) In response to Prof. Cover's impassioned plea, I can only say that it IS possible, with some concerted effort to force publishers to change their ways. The American Sociological Association has recently, as of Sept 1, 1987, in fact, begun to require of all periodicals published under their aegis, that any computer readable files, (both data and software) BE CITED in the bibliography. There is an effort under way now to convince other academic publishers to follow suit. There are a number of reasons for citation of computer files: (a) computer-readable files are intellectual property in their own right, quite as much as publications in other media, eg on paper, film, audio-tape, canvas, etc. (This has been recognized by that most conservative institution, the American Library Association, since the late 1970s.) The authors (properly called 'principal investigators'), producers, publishers, editors, and translators, of computer-readable files deserve for their labours the same acknowledgement and recognition as do the authors, composers, etc of intellectual property in more traditional media. (b) the citation of source materials in the bibliographies of publications acknowledges the source materials used in the research process, thus enabling ones peers to follow the same line of reasonsing, using the same source materials, to (hopefully) come to the same conclusions, thus corroborating our initial reasoning - ie the peer review process. (c) once computer-readable files are cited in bibliographies, they will get picked up in the citation indices, and thus eventually come to the attention of tenure committees. Thus individual 'authors' of these things will in time receive their due academic brownie-points. But citing computer-readable files is not enough. There must also be a mechanism for preserving them for posterity and making them available to others for secondary analysis. Researchers are reluctant to make 'their' files available to others for fear that they will not receive their due acknowledgement (- the polite reason). Mandatory citation of computer files in publications should help reduce this fear. Many researchers are not aware that there in fact exists a network of local data archives/data libraries in academic institutions throughout the United States and Canada, as well as a well developed system of national data archives in Europe, most recently in Hungary, Israel, and the USSR. Granted, these data archives primarily concentrate on 'social science' data files, primarily because that is the field from which the initial impetus for their creation came. However, this orientation is not cast in stone. And most of these data archives/libraries could with appropriate overtures, be convinced that there are other user communities that also need their services. The social scientists just happen to have been among the earliest and most vociferous. The point being that there is already an institutional framework, staffed by knowledgeable and experienced people who with very little effort could provide the network of text archives that humanists seem to want - all they want is a little proding. ------------------------------------------------------------ Laine Ruus, University of British Columbia Data Library userDLDB@ubcmtsg.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 3 December 1987, 19:22:30 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion Comments: Contributor: STEPHEN@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia There is a relay at ULCC (UK) called EAN which links with ACSnet - the fact that you do not register before submitting suggests it is 'free': you may be able to learn further from mailing an enquiry to laision@uk.ac.ean-relay EAN can also link you to other European sites as well - maybe to addresses 'missing' from EARN stephen@uk.ac.oxford.vax ========================================================================= Date: 4 December 1987, 13:02:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by Bob Kraft Subject: CD-ROMs Just to supplement Ted Brunner's information on the TLG CD-ROM, regarding the non-TLG materials such as were included on TLG disk "A" -- the present plan is for the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) jointly with the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) at Penn to produce an "experimental" CD-ROM at the heart of which will be various Latin texts (being prepared at PHI), Greek Papyri (Duke) and Inscriptions (Cornell, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study), and a variety of biblical and related materials in various languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Armenian) as well as sample files from various other sources and projects (e.g. Dante Commentary project, Milton Latin project, Kierkegaard in Danish, Arabic poetry, some word lists, etc.). I call this disk a "Sampler," and it is scheduled to be ready for distribution by the end of this month (December). Again, the aim is to give scholars, software developers, etc., a body of consistently formatted (more or less!) materials on which to work in various directions and at little cost. There will be a notice on HUMANIST when the PHI/CCAT joint CD-ROM "Sampler" is ready for distribution! Bob Kraft for CCAT ========================================================================= Date: 4 December 1987, 13:10:19 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Subject: Enlightening the publishers, encoding Semitic (65 lines) Michael Sperberg-McQueen has suggested that we need a text archive in North America. Is that a generally felt need? What could a text archive here offer that Oxford does not offer? Certainly, shipping would be faster and cheaper, but is there something more substantial? Or are there real hardships now? Or, could our needs be addressed by some adjustments in the services that Oxford provides---such that we might better discuss our needs with Oxford instead of duplicating their efforts. If we DO need an archive in North America, who should institute and manage it? What is the proper sort of organization? And what's in it for them? Will it be a costly burden? Or are we willing to pay for materials in order support such a facility? Would it be commercial or non-profit? --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 4 December 1987, 13:17:33 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by James H. Coombs Subject: ACH text markup Some thoughts on guidelines for text markup, in response to Michael Sperberg-McQueen's note. 1) Markup must be descriptive. 2) Delimiters should be '<' and '>' in conformance with the default of the new SMGL standard. 3) Markup/tag attributes should be allowed, and attribute names should be descriptive. 4) There should be no attempt at establishing a "closed" tag set. The current AAP SGML application allows for definition of new tags, but it does not support such definition in a practical way. The consequence is that people will use "list items," for example, when they should be using "line of poetry." Within these guidelines, it can only be healthy to provide a list of tags that people should choose from when tagging certain entities. The point of this is that we cannot predict what textual elements will be of significance for what researchers. We have to allow for the discovery of textual elements that no one has categorized previously. At the same time, there is no point in having 30 different tags for "line of poetry." The guidelines should make clear that DESCRIPTION is paramount and that the use of particular tags is secondary. 5) In so far as possible, there should be requirements for minimal tagging. It would be a mistake to fail to tag "verse paragraphs" and "book" in *Paradise Lost*, for example, and any version that does not provide such tags must be considered inadequate and, ultimately, rejected. 6) There can be no limit placed on "maximal" tagging. If a researcher needs every word tagged, we must allow for this. It is a trivial matter to ignore or strip out such tagging. Researchers with such needs cannot, at least for now, reasonably expect that others will provide such exhaustive tagging. Putting (5) and (6) together, we have a principle of base-level tagging with as much additional information as the original researchers care to provide. Where there are common needs that may not be shared by the original researcher, it may still be appropriate to require that those common needs be met. For example, the original researcher may not need to know about verse paragraphs, but we should still require that they be appropriately tagged. 7) Referential markup should be used in place of "special" characters, such as accented characters. If a particular configuration supports an acute accent, for example, in hardware, the researcher may take advantage of those facilities. When checking the document into an archive or passing it on to others, however, the acute accent must be translated to "á" (or whatever the SGML standard specifies---don't have my copy at hand). This is off the top of my head, but enough for now. I have other ideas on this stuff, but they can come out if discussion ensues. I am interested in the project, but I don't have the time or money to travel to meetings right now. I also get the feeling from the preliminary document that you posted that people are re-inventing SGML. We already have, in SGML, a metalanguage for generating descriptive markup languages. I don't think that we need Document Type Definitions right now, but even they might turn out to be useful once SGML is established and SGML-support tools become widespread. I haven't provided any defense of descriptive markup or SGML here. We discuss the advantages of these systems in "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing," *Communications of the ACM*, November 1987--- written with Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose. Interested in any and all comments! --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 4 December 1987, 16:03:15 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: "International Educational Computing" POSSIBLE COURSE 3551 - SUMMER, 1988 - R. G. RAGSDALE The European Conference on Computers in Education is being held in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 24-29, 1988. When the World Conference on Computers in Education was held there in 1981, a substantial number of OISE students attended, some as a portion of a course offered by Bob McLean. I propose to offer a course, 3551 - International Educational Computing: An Interaction of Values and Technology, which would take place in Switzerland, around the dates of the conference. Permission to offer the course formally depends on several factors, including the number of students likely to attend. Plans are incomplete at this time, but a projection of the plans indicates the following format, assuming that all necessary arrangements for housing, classroom, etc., can be made. The course participants will meet together July 18-22 to study previous research and theory on values and technology, methods for evaluating the effects of technology, and case studies in business and education of technology-value conflicts. The daily schedule will have more formal sessions (lecture, seminar) in the mornings and less formal sessions (group discussions) in the early evening, with afternoons free for individual study or other activities (scheduled class time for each day will be four hours, probably two and a half in the morning, one and a half in the evening). During this week, participants will select and prepare for the issue(s) they plan to study during the conference. At the conference, each participant will focus on one or more topics, such as a particular age range, subject matter area, or type of computer application. They will collect material from the formal sessions, but also from informal interviews with others attending the conference, both presenters and those who are only attending. August 1 is a Swiss national holiday (which all course participants should enjoy), so the remaining sessions will take place August 2-5, following the same schedule as the first week. During this time the results of the previous week's activities will be presented and group feedback will obtained. Final papers will be due in mid-September. Preliminary arrangements for accommodation and classroom space have been made at Aiglon College, an English boarding school in Chesieres, Switzerland, about one hour from Lausanne by train and bus. Room rates include the "taxe de sejour" which gives access to the recreational facilities of Villars, such as the swimming pool, ice skating, etc. _________ ____ Estimated_Cost Based on 1987 prices, the airfare to Geneva is $927, room and board is 860SF (Swiss Francs) for 20 days, and the conference registration is 280SF (higher after January 31). At current exchange rates, these items total almost $2,000. A better estimate would include ground transportation, other likely expenses (chocolate, etc.), and possible price increases. It seems extremely unlikely that necessary expenses would exceed $2,500. Anyone who is interested in participating in this course should indicate this to me in writing (including, if possible, your "estimate of certainty"). ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 11:02:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by Nancy Ide Subject: TEXT MARK-UP (73 lines) I recently responded to Jim Coombs' remarks concerning the principles developed at Poughkeepsie as a basis for the development of a standard for encoding machine-readable texts. He suggested that we make our discussion "public," in the spirit of recent remarks on HUMANIST, and so I will briefly describe what has been said and put forth my reply. I inidicated to Jim that much of what he says is very much in the spirit of the discussions at Poughkeepsie among the 31 participants. This shou ld be made clearer in the minutes of the meeting, which Lou Burnard has drawn up and which will be available from him or me in a few days. Especially, we intend to make the standard extensible to accomodate the unforeseen needs of individual projects. I also indicated that the standard will *recommend* a minimum set of tags for texts, which is stated in the principles under number 5, I believe. We had a lively discussion on this topic (actually, all of the discussions we very lively!) at the Poughkeepsie meeting, with some disagreement about specifying a minumum. This is why *recommend* is in emphasis. The feeling at the meeting was that we can *require* nothing, but we can do our best to "guide the perplexed" and provide some idea of what it makes sense to encode regardless of how the text is originally intended to be used. I should point out here that among participants in the Poughkeepsie meeting, there were two clear perspectives on the whole issue of encoding texts: one saw most encoding as a future endeavor, and the other was focused on texts already encoded. One's opinion concerning whether most texts have been encoded already or have yet to be encoded obviously affects opinion on the importance of specifying a minimum set of tags for encoded texts. Jim responded to me suggesting that we could refuse to accept texts that had been encoded without the "minimum" tags we might expect. He made all of the excellent arguments for insisting that certain tags be included *anytime* a tex is encoded. But the problem here is that I am not sure who the "we" who is to do this refusing actually is. If someone does not provide the minimum tags but has encoded the collected works of some obscure author I am interested in, will I refuse to accept the text? If I am an archive, should I refuse to take the text--that is, is it better to have an inadequately tagged text or none at all? Admittedly, in some cases it may be better to start from scratch and re-enter a text, if the existing version is pitifully done. But most of the time it will be easier to go in and mark whatever I need to mark in the existing version than to re-enter the text entirely. Similarly, we cannot expect archives to ensure that their texts contain a minimum tag set. This was a point of considerable concern to the keepers of archives present at the meeting, and led to the final agreement that only the tags that are present (whatever they may be) in a text that is distributed by an archive will conform to the standard. This requirement in itself will necessitate the writing of programs to perform tranlsation to the new scheme, another topic addressed at some length and for which there seems to be support. However, note that the principles indicate that texts now contained in the archive need not be converted retrospectively. Naturally, although this is not required we hope that it will occur in many cases. So, the guidelines that will be developed will recommend a minimum set of tags---especially, for those things that are easily encoded when the source text is at hand and which are also obviously of use in most types of analysis. However, it does not appear to me that it is reasonable to require such tagging. We can only hope that the recommendation is enough to inspire most researchers to provide the minimum set of tags when they encode new texts. Nancy M. Ide ide@vassar.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 11:10:43 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by Nancy Ide Subject: more on mark-up (34 lines) In my earlier message I neglected to summarize my reply to Jim Coombs concerning SGML. We have every expectation that the standard we devise will be an application of SGML, but until we know fully our needs it is not prudent to commit ourselves to SGML. We know, for instance, that while it is possible to define multiple parallel hierarchies in SGML it is not entirely straightforward, and such parallel hierarchies are likely to be used extensively in encoding machine-readable texts intended for literary, linguistic, and historical analysis. We hope that in any event the standard will be compatible with SGML, which, as Jim points out, is bound to become widely accepted and used. Also, Jim had some concern about our defining a meta-language, since SGML (the abstract syntax) is in fact a meta-language for describing a mark-up scheme. The concrete syntax of SGML is one mark-up scheme described by this abstract syntax. However, our goal is to provide a meta-language in which *all* existing mark-up schemes can be described (which may prove to be impossible), and it seems to us that the abstract syntax of SGML is inadequate for this task. The abstract syntax of SGML was not intended for this purpose, it should be noted. Nancy M. Ide ide@vassar.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 11:15:37 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by C. S. Hunter Subject: Use of electronic communictions (29 lines) Willard notes the high percentage of "silent participants" on HUMANIST. My experience with computer conferencing systems makes his note not at all surprising. At the University of Guelph we have had our CoSy conferencing system available free of charge to all faculty for some years now. Only about 40 % of the faculty actually took us up on the offer of a free account on the system. Of that 40 %, only 25 % (or less) actively use the system more than once a week. The ratio of active to passive participants on the system is something like 1 : 9. The same is roughly true on the student system, where only about 10 % of the registered users are actual active participants. We are now studying the phenomenon to determine what factors contribute to the individual use or non-use of computer-mediated communication among academics. . C. Stuart Hunter, University of Guelph cshunter@uoguelph ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 11:41:45 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: E-mail to Australia Contributed by Emmanuel Tov IN REPLY TO THE QUESTION OF BRENDAN O'FLAHERTY (3 DEC) I CAN TELL YOU THAT MAIL FROM SYDNEY (MACQUARIE UNIV.) TO ISRAEL AND EUROPE AND THE U.S. IS FREE AS WELL AS REVERSE MAIL. EMANUEL TOV ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 16:58:56 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Subject: Text encoding [In reply to Nancy Ide's points about SGML and related matters. The inset paragraphs quote from her messages. -- ed.] We have every expectation that the standard we devise will be an application of SGML, but until we know fully our needs it is not prudent to commit ourselves to SGML. A minor philosophical point, I guess: I don't think that we CAN know our needs fully. We need standards that accommodate needs that cannot be predicted today. The practical consequence of this observation, which I'm sure Nancy would agree with, is that one should seek a "productive" system instead of a system that satisfies everything on a list, and one should not spend a lot of time developing the list. We know, for instance, that while it is possible to define multiple parallel hierarchies in SGML it is not entirely straightforward, and such parallel hierarchies are likely to be used extensively in encoding machine-readable texts intended for literary, linguistic, and historical analysis. What are "multiple parallel hierarchies"? I can guess, but I want to be sure that I understand the problem. In a most documents, we have, for example, pragmatic and syntactic hierarchies. One has no difficulty marking up documents for both at the same time (although one does not normally mark up the latter descriptively). Pragmatically, we have things like [ [ [ ] [ ] ] ] CHAPTER SECTION PARAGRAPH PARAGRAPH Syntactically, we might have [ [ ] [ [ ] ] ] S NP VP NP So far as I know, there are no difficulties in marking up both types of hierarchies. One could argue that we really have a single hierarchy here, but, conceptually at least, we have two different domains: pragmatics and syntax. Well, this distinction is bound to be controversial, to say the least! This is probably the wrong list for a discussion about syntax vs. pragmatics, etc. I can try other examples, but I'm still guessing. And I'm still wondering what the difficulty is in encoding them under SGML. However, our goal is to provide a meta-language in which *all* existing mark-up schemes can be described (which may prove to be impossible), and it seems to us that the abstract syntax of SGML is inadequate for this task. What is the practical value of a metalanguage that generates all markup languages? I would think that it would be so abstract as to be of no value. I suspect that this is part of the goal of salvaging work that has been inadequately coded. I believe that we will be better off if we worry less about the past and plan more for the future. I suppose that it's true that publishers have typesetting tapes in their basements, and that we could use those tapes. I think that we have to accept that those tapes are of little value until someone converts the coding to descriptive markup. I have the typesetting tape for the American Heritage Dictionary (sorry, can't distribute it); no one wasted time trying to figure out how to use that tape as it is now. I know of several projects that are based on that tape, and all required conversions. Ideally, the tape would have been converted once and for all (and it apparently has been now). Whether it's a dictionary or a literary text, we can expect that inadequate coding will cause considerable work for anyone attempting to use the database. A metalanguage that includes procedural markup as well as descriptive markup will not help in such a case, because one still has to map procedural markup onto descriptive markup in order to be able to work with meaningful entities (definition, paragraph, etc.). Since procedural markup tends to be performed somewhat arbitrarily and does not normally provide a one-to-one relationship between entity and markup, there is no metalanguage that will help a researcher perform the necessary conversions. What we really need is a sensible and dynamic standard. I don't think that anyone would argue that that standard should be anything other than descriptively based. Since we are going to have to convert texts to descriptive markup in order to use them anyway, why not just develop the standard and convert as necessary. Trying to save the past is just going to retard development. I haven't mentioned SGML so far. Is there a problem with SGML? I have heard complaints, and we addressed them in our article. No one expects individual scholars to master the full syntax and to generate Document Type Definitions (DTD). What we want is accurate and consistent descriptive markup. In our experience at Brown, people have no difficulties mastering the principles of descriptive markup. We can leave the development of DTDs to experts. --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 17:12:16 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contributed by "James H. Coombs" Subject: Markup: on requirements My thanks to Nancy Ide for moving the discussion out to HUMANIST. Things have fallen a little out of sequence, but the ideas are more important than the sequence anyway. I have also heard from Michael Sperberg-McQueen, and I hope that he will post his very informative note as well. If this discussion becomes aggravating for the majority of HUMANISTs and there is enough interest, then perhaps we can form a separate mailing list. So, here is my (unedited) reply to the issue of requirements. While we may not be able to require that people conform to a standard fully, we can refuse to accept inadequate texts. There is an atmosophere of poverty now such that we are anxious to have whatever we can get our hands on. At the extreme, even now most of us would reject a text that is all in upper case and contains errors---it turns out to be easier to do it oneself. If we consider what things will be like or could be like in a few years though, I think it's appropriate to say that there are certain minimal standards (or one must comply with with a standard). First, we don't accept just anything for other scholarly documents. Second, we will have more alternatives for sources. Third, we want high quality sources so that people won't have to keep reworking or entirely redoing. If I can't count on a text from a particular archive to meet my needs, what is my motivation for bothering with that archive; and what is the motivation for the archive's existence? I certainly would not want to see it supported by public funds. I don't think that this places an inordinate burden on individual researchers. For the most part, I'm sure that it's considerably less burdensome than ensuring that one's bibliography, for example, accords with the MLA style sheet (and what bibliography unambiguously does?). --Jim I should elaborate briefly. First, I have/had a tape of Milton's *Paradise Lost*; it was so bad that I would prefer to start from scratch. Second, I think that we have a right to expect archives to set and maintain certain standards. Perhaps they don't want to accept that responsibility right now. If not, then I think that we should be planning to develop and support a good archive. Does such an archive need several programmers for text validation and maintenance? Then they should have the support to hire them. Let's centralize the expense as much as possible. Currently, we have no idea who is entering what and how they are doing it. Even if we could get people to go to the archive, the current approach means that many people are going to have to massage texts into useful formats, and every project will have to ensure that the text is accurate. It's as if we all had to revise our copies of *Paradise Lost* and then go proof read them before we could use them. Finally, I have texts that I have entered, marked up, and proof read, but I'm reluctant to check them into an archive that is inconsistent at best. Whatever professional credit I might get for the contribution---well, let's say that the effort is somewhat discredited by the state of the archive. It's like publishing a book with XYZ press instead of ABC. I would be happy to send it off to someone who provides full services and validates text, and I would be happy to make any necessary corrections. To reverse the roles, I am reluctant to acquire a text from an archive that makes no guarantees. After all, in the process of keyboarding a text, I get to read it, and the time goes quickly. It's the proofreading that is burdensome, and I still have to proofread. (Or do I get to say that I used X's text, and X is going to accept the responsibility for errors.) --Jim Dr. James H. Coombs Software Engineer, Research Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University jazbo@brownvm.bitnet ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 17:24:17 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Subject: ACL Applied Natural Language Conference (833 lines) The following is republished from IRLIST, the Information Retrieval List. -- ed.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The printed version of the following program and registration information will be mailed to ACL members early in December. Others are encouraged to use the attached form or write for a booklet to the following address: Dr. D.E. Walker (ACL), 445 South Street - MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA, or to walker@flash.bellcore.com, specifying "ACL Applied" on the subject line. ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 9 - 12 February 1988 Austin Marriott at the Capitol, Austin, Texas, USA Tutorials: Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin ADVANCE PROGRAM Features: Six introductory and advanced tutorials Three days of papers on the state-of-the-art Distinguished luncheon speakers A panel of industry leaders Exhibits and demonstrations REGISTRATION : 7:30am - 3:00pm, Tuesday, 9 February, Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26th and Red River. 7:00pm - 9:00PM, Tuesday, 9 February 8:00am - 5:00pm, Wednesday, 10 February 8:00am - 5:00pm, Thursday, 11 February 8:00am - 12:00n, Friday, 12 February Austin Marriott at the Capitol, 701 East 11th Street EXHIBITS : 10:00am - 6:00pm, Wednesday, 10 February 10:00am - 6:00pm, Thursday, 11 February 9:00am - 12:00n, Friday, 12 February Austin Marriott at the Capitol TUTORIALS: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1988 Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26th and Red River. 8:30 12:30 INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING James Allen, University of Rochester 8:30 12:30 MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES: A COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE Bran Boguraev, Cambridge University, and Beth Levin, Northwestern University 8:30 12:30 SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Salim Roucos, BBN Laboratories, Inc. 1:30 5:30 THE TECHNOLOGY OF NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES Carole Hafner, Northeastern University 1:30 5:30 THE ROLE OF LOGIC IN REPRESENTING MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE Bob Moore, SRI International 1:30 5:30 MACHINE TRANSLATION Sergei Nirenburg, Carnegie Mellon University RECEPTION: 7:00pm - 9:00pm, Tuesday, 9 February Austin Marriott at the Capitol, 701 East 11th Street GENERAL SESSIONS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1988 9:00 9:15 OPENING REMARKS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS Norman Sondheimer, General Chair (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Bruce Ballard, Program Chair (AT&T Bell Laboratories) Jonathan Slocum, Local Arrangements Chair (MCC) Donald E. Walker, ACL Secretary-Treasurer (Bell Communications Research) SESSION 1: SYSTEMS 9:15 9:40 The Multimedia Articulation of Answers in a Natural Language Query System Susan E. Brennan (Hewlett Packard) 9:40 10:05 A News Story Categorization System Philip J. Hayes, Laura E. Knecht and Monica J. Cellio (Carnegie Group) 10:05 10:30 An Architecture for Anaphora Resolution Elaine Rich and Susann Luper-Foy (MCC) SESSION 2: GENERATION 11:00 11:25 The SEMSYN Generation System: Ingredients, Applications, Prospects Dietmar Roesner (Universitaet Stuttgart) 11:25 11:50 Two Simple Prediction Algorithms to Facilitate Text Production Lois Boggess (Mississippi State University) 11:50 12:15 From Water to Wine: Generating Natural Language Text from Today's Applications Programs David D. McDonald (Brattle Research Corporation) and Marie M. Meteer (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) 12:15 2:00 LUNCHEON Guest Speaker: Grant Dove Chairman and CEO of MCC. Prior to joining MCC in July l987, Mr. Dove had been with Texas Instruments for 28 years, having served as Executive Vice President since l982. SESSION 3: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS 2:00 2:25 Improved Portability and Parsing Through Interactive Acquisition of Semantic Information Francois-Michel Lang and Lynettte Hirschman (Unisys) 2:25 2:50 Handling Scope Ambiguities in English Sven Hurum (University of Alberta) 2:50 3:15 Responding to Semantically Ill-Formed Input Ralph Grishman and Ping Peng (New York University) and Evaluation of a Parallel Chart Parser Ralph Grishman and Mahesh Chitrao (New York University) SESSION 4: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON 3:45 4:10 Triphone Analysis: A Combined Method for the Correction of Orthographical and Typographical Errors Koenraad DeSmedt (University of Nijmegen) and Brigette van Berkel (TNO Institute of Applied Computer Science) 4:10 4:35 Creating and Querying Hierarchical Lexical Databases Mary S. Neff, Roy J. Byrd, and Omneya A. Rizk (IBM Watson Research Center) 4:35 5:00 Cn yur cmputr raed ths? Linda G. Means (General Motors) 5:00 5:25 Building a Large Thesaurus for Information Retrieval Edward A. Fox, J. Terry Nutter (Virginia Tech), Thomas Ahlswede, Martha Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology), and Judith Markowitz (Navistar International) 6:30 **** RECEPTION Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1988 SESSION 5: SYSTEMS 8:30 8:55 Application-Specific Issues in NLI Development for a Diagnostic Expert System Karen L. Ryan, Rebecca Root and Duane Olawsky (Honeywell) 8:55 9:20 The MULTIVOC Text-to-Speech System Olivier Emorine and Pierre Martin (Cap Sogeti Innovation) 9:20 9:45 Structure from Anarchy: Meta Level Representation of Expert System Predicates for Natural Language Interfaces Galina Datskovsky Moerdler (Columbia University) SESSION 6: TEXT PROCESSING 10:15 10:40 Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies in a Text Processing System Lisa F. Rau and Paul S. Jacobs (General Electric) 10:40 11:05 A Stochastic Parts Program and Noun Phrase Parser for Unrestricted Text Kenneth W. Church (AT&T Bell Laboratories) 11:05 11:30 A Tool for Investigating the Synonymy Relation in a Sense Disambiguated Thesaurus Martin S. Chodorow, Yael Ravin (IBM Watson Research Center) and Howard E. Sachar (IBM Data Systems Division) 11:30 11:55 Dictionary Text Entries as a Source of Knowledge for Syntactic and Other Disambiguations Karen Jensen and Jean-Louis Binot (IBM Watson Research Center) 12:00 1:45 LUNCHEON Guest Speaker: Donald E. Walker Manager of Artificial Intelligence and Information Science Research at Bell Communications Research, and Secretary-Treasurer of ACL and IJCAII.. SESSION 7: MACHINE TRANSLATION 1:45 2:10 EUROTRA: Practical Experience with a Multilingual Machine Translation System under Development Giovanni B. Varile and Peter Lau (Commission of the European Communities) 2:10 2:35 Valency and MT: Recent Developments in the METAL System Rudi Gebruers (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) 3:00 5:00 PANEL: Natural Language Interfaces: Present and Future Moderator: Norman Sondheimer (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Panelists: Robert J. Bobrow (BBN Laboratories), Developer of RUS Jerrold Ginsparg (Natural Language Inc.), Developer of DataTalker Larry Harris (Artificial Intelligence Corporation), Developer of Intellect Gary G. Hendrix (Symantec), Developer of Q&A Steve Klein (Singular Solutions Engineering) Co-Developer of Lotus HOW 5:00 6:00 RECEPTION Austin Marriott at the Capitol FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1988 SESSION 8: SYSTEMS 8:30 8:55 Automatically Generating Natural Language Reports in an Office Environment Jugal Kalita and Sunil Shende (University of Pennsylvania) 8:55 9:20 Luke: An Experiment in the Early Integration of Natural Language Processing David A. Wroblewski and Elaine A. Rich (MCC) 9:20 9:45 The Experience of Developing a Large-Scale Natural Language Text Processing System: CRITIQUE Stephen D. Richardson and Lisa C. Braden-Harder (IBM Watson Research Center) SESSION 9: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON 10:15 10:40 Computational Techniques for Improved Name Search Beatrice T. Oshika (Sparta), Bruce Evans (TRW), Janet Tom (Systems Development Corporation), and Filip Machi (UC Berkeley) 10:40 11:05 The TICC: Parsing Interesting Text David Allport (University of Sussex) 11:05 11:30 Finding Clauses in Unrestricted Text by Stochastic and Finitary Methods Eva Ejerhed (University of Umea) 11:30 11:55 Morphological Processing in the Nabu System Jonathan Slocum (MCC) SESSION 10: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS 1:30 1:55 Localizing Expression of Ambiguity John Bear and Jerry R. Hobbs (SRI International) 1:55 2:20 Combinatorial Disambiguation Paula S. Newman (IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center) 2:20 2:45 Canonical Representation in NLP System Design: A Critical Evaluation Kent Wittenburg and Jim Barnett (MCC) REGISTRATION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS PREREGISTRATION MUST BE RECEIVED BY 25 JANUARY; after that date, please wait to register at the Conference itself. Complete the attached ``Application for Registration'' and send it with a check payable to Association for Computational Linguistics or ACL to Donald E. Walker (ACL), Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA; (201) 829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com; ucbvax!bellcore!walker. If a registration is cancelled before 25 January, the registration fee, less $15 for administrative costs, will be returned. Full conference registrants will also receive lunch on the 10th and 11th. Registration includes one copy of the Proceedings, available at the Conference. Copies of the Proceedings at $20 for members ($30 for nonmembers) may be ordered on the registration form or by mail prepaid from Walker. TUTORIALS : Attendance is limited. Preregistration is encouraged to ensure a place and the availability of syllabus materials. RECEPTIONS : The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) will host a reception for the conference at its site on Wednesday evening. To aid in planning we ask that you complete the RSVP on the registration form. In addition there will be receptions at the conference hotel on Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon. EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS : Facilities for exhibits and system demonstrations will be available. Persons wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should contact Kent Wittenburg, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3626; wittenburg@mcc.com as soon as possible. HOTEL RESERVATIONS : Reservations at the Austin Marriott at the Capitol MUST be made using the Hotel Reservation Form included with this flyer. Reservations subject to guest room availability for reservations received after 25 January 1988. Please mail to: Austin Marriott at the Capitol Attn: Reservation Office 701 East 11th Street Austin, Texas 78701 (512) 478-1111 AIR TRANSPORTATION : American Airlines offers conferees a special 35% off full coach fare, 30% off full Y fares for passengers originating in Canada, or 5% off any published roundtrip airfare applicable to and from Austin. Call toll free 1-800-433-1790 and give the conference's STAR number S81816. If you normally use the service of a travel agent, please have them make your reservations through this number. DIRECTIONS : There is one public exit from Robert Mueller Airport in Austin; at the traffic light, turn right (onto Manor Rd.) and drive to Airport Blvd. (approx. 1/4 - 1/2 mile). Turn right on Airport Blvd., and drive to highway I-35 (approx. 1-2 miles). Turn left (south) onto I-35, heading toward town. Get off at the 11th-12th St. (Capitol) exit, and drive an extra block on the access road, to 11th St. The Marriott is on the SW corner of that intersection (across 11th St., on the right). A parking garage is attached. The Marriott at the Capitol operates a free shuttle to and from the airport. Cab fare would be approx. $6. The Joe C. Thompson Conference Center parking lot is on the SW corner of Red River and 26th Street; the entrance is on Red River, and a guard will point out the center (adjacent, to the west). Directions to JCT from Marriott parking garage: Turn right (S) on I-35 frontage road, turn right (W) on 10th St., turn right (N) on Red River, and drive [almost] to 26th. APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION Association for Computational Linguistics, Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, 9 - 12 February 1988, Austin, Texas NAME _________________________________________________________________ Last First Middle AFFILIATION (Short form for badge ID) ___________________________________________________________ ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ TELEPHONE ____________________________________________________________ COMPUTER NET ADDRESS _________________________________________________ REGISTRATION INFORMATION (circle fee) NOTE: Only those whose dues are paid for 1988 can register as members. ACL NON- FULL-TIME MEMBER* MEMBER* STUDENT* by 25 JANUARY $170 $205 $85 at the Conference $220 $255 $110 *Member and Non-Member fees include Wednesday and Thursday luncheons; Students can purchase luncheon tickets at a reduced rate. LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR STUDENTS: $10 each; Wednesday _____; Thursday ________; amount enclosed $ ______ LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR GUESTS: $15 each; Wednesday _____; Thursday ________; amount enclosed $ ______ SPECIAL MEALS: VEGETARIAN ______ KOSHER ______ EXTRA PROCEEDINGS: $20 members; $30 non-members; amount enclosed $ ______ TUTORIAL INFORMATION (circle fee and check at most two tutorials) FEE PER TUTORIAL ACL NON- FULL-TIME MEMBER MEMBER* STUDENT by 25 January $75 $110 $50 at the Conference $100 $135 $65 *Non-member tutorial fee includes ACL membership for 1988; do not pay non-member fee for BOTH registration and tutorials. Morning Tutorials: select ONE: INTRODUCTION: Allen LEXICONS: Boguraev & SPEECH: Roucos Levin Afternoon Tutorials: select ONE: INTERFACES: Hafner LOGIC: Moore TRANSLATION: Nirenburg TOTAL PAYMENT MUST BE INCLUDED : $ ____________ (Registration, Luncheons, Extra Proceedings, Tutorials) Make checks payable to ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS or ACL. Credit cards cannot be honored. RSVP for MCC Reception: Please check if you plan to attend the MCC reception on Wednesday evening, February 10th. _________ Send Application for Registration WITH PAYMENT before 25 January to the address below; AFTER 25 January, wait to register at Conference: Donald E. Walker (ACL) Bell Communications Research 445 South Street, MRE 2A379 Morristown, NJ 07960, USA (201)829-4312 walker@flash.bellcore.com ucbvax!bellcore!walker APPLICATION FOR HOTEL REGISTRATION Reservations subject to guest room availability for reservations received after 25 January 1988. In the event of unanticipated demand, rooms will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Please send in your reservation request as early as possible. NAME _________________________________________________________________ Last First Middle AFFILIATION ___________________________________________________________ ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ TELEPHONE ____________________________________________________________ Room Requirements Single $64 ________ Double $74 ________ Date and time of arrival _________________________________________ Date and time of departure _______________________________________ Complete if arrival after 6PM __________________________________________________________________ Credit Card Name Number Expiration Date Send Application for Hotel Reservation to: Austin Marriott at the Capitol Attn: Reservation Office 701 East 11th Street Austin, Texas 78701 (512) 478-1111 ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TUTORIALS 9 February 1988 Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin Morning 8:30 A.M. - 12:30 P.M. 8:30 12:30 INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING James Allen, University of Rochester ABSTRACT This tutorial will cover the basic concepts underlying the construction of natural language processing systems. These include basic parsing techniques, semantic interpretation and the representation of sentence meaning, as well as knowledge representation and techniques for understanding natural language in context. In particular, the topics to be addressed in detail will include augmented transition networks (ATNs), augmented context-free grammars, the representation of lexical meaning, especially looking at case-grammar based representations, and the interpretation of pronouns and ellipsis. In addition, there will be an overview of knowledge representation, including semantic networks, frame-based systems, and logic, and the use of general world knowledge in language understanding, including scripts and plans. Given the large range of issues and techniques, an emphasis will be placed on those aspects relevant to existing practical natural language systems, such as interfaces to database systems. The remaining issues will be more quickly surveyed to give the attendee an idea of what techniques will become important in the next generation of natural language systems. The lecture notes will include an extensive bibliography of work in each area. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at people who are interested in learning the fundamental techniques and ideas relevant to natural language processing. It will be useful to managers who want an overview of the field, to programmers starting research and development in the natural language area, and to researchers in related disciplines such as linguistics who want a survey of the computational approaches to language. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. James Allen is an Associate Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester. He is editor of the journal Computational Linguistics and author of the book Natural Language Understanding, published in 1987. In 1984, he received a five-year Presidential Young Investigator award for his research in Artificial Intelligence. 8:30 12:30 MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES: A COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE Branimir Boguraev, Cambridge University, and Beth Levin, Northwestern University ABSTRACT The lexical information contained explicitly and implicitly in machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) can support a wide range of activities in computational linguistics, both of theoretical interest and of practical importance. This tutorial falls into two parts. The first part will focus on some characteristics of raw lexical data in electronic sources, which make MRDs particularly relevant to natural language processing applications. The second part will discuss how theoretical linguistic research into the lexicon can enhance the contribution of MRDs to applied computational linguistics. The first half will discuss issues concerning the placement of rich lexical resources on-line; raise questions related to the suitability, and ultimately the utility, of MRDs for automatic natural language processing; outline a methodology aimed at extracting maximally usable subsets of the dictionary with minimal introduction of errors; and present ways in which specific use can be made of the lexical data for the construction of practical language processing systems with substantial coverage. The second half of the tutorial will review current theoretical linguistic research on the lexicon, emphasizing proposals concerning the nature of lexical representation and lexical organization. This overview will provide the context for an examination of how the results of this research can be brought to bear on the problem of extracting syntactic and semantic information encoded in dictionary entries, but not overtly signaled to the dictionary user. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial presupposes some familiarity with work in both computational and theoretical linguistics. It is aimed at researchers in natural language processing and theoretical linguists who want to take advantage of the resources available in MRDs for both applied and theoretical purposes. The issues of providing substantial lexical coverage and system transportability are addressed, thus making this tutorial of particular relevance to those concerned with the automatic acquisition, on a large scale and in a flexible format, of phonological, syntactic, and semantic information for nlp systems. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES Dr. Branimir Boguraev is an SERC (UK Science & Engineering Research Council) Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has been with the Computer Laboratory since 1975, and completed a doctoral thesis in natural language processing there in 1979. Recently he has been involved in the development of computational tools for natural language processing, funded by grants awarded by the UK Alvey Programme in Information Technology. Dr. Beth Levin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She was a System Development Foundation Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science from 1983-1987 where she assumed major responsibility for directing the MIT Lexicon Project. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in June 1983. 8:30 12:30 SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Salim Roucos, BBN Laboratories, Inc. ABSTRACT: This tutorial will present the issues in developing spoken language systems for natural speech communication between a person and a machine. In particular, the performance of complex tasks using large vocabularies and unrestricted sentence structures will be examined. The first Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Speech Understanding Research project during the seventies will be reviewed, and then the current state-of-the-art in continuous speech recognition and natural language processing will be described. Finally, the types of spoken language systems' capabilities expected to be developed during the next two to three years will be presented. The technical issues that will be covered include acoustic-phonetic modeling, syntax, semantics, plan recognition and discourse, and the issues for integrating these knowledge sources for speech understanding. In addition, computational requirements for real-time understanding, and performance evaluation methodology will be described. Some of the human factors of speech understanding in the context of performing interactive tasks using an integrated interface will also be discussed. INTENDED AUDIENCE: This tutorial is aimed at technical managers, product developers, and technical staff interested in learning about spoken language systems and their potential applications. No expertise in either speech or natural language will be assumed in introducing the technical details in the tutorial. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Dr. Salim Roucos has worked for seven years at BBN Laboratories in speech processing such as continuous speech recognition, speaker recognition, and speech compression. More recently, he has been the principal investigator on integrating speech recognition and natural language understanding for developing a spoken language system. His areas of interest are statistical pattern recognition and language modeling. Dr. Roucos is chairman of the Digital Signal Processing committee of the IEEE ASSP society. Afternoon 1:30 P.M. - 5:30 P.M. 1:30 5:30 THE TECHNOLOGY OF NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University ABSTRACT This tutorial will describe the development of natural language processing from a research topic into a commercial technology. This will include a description of some key research projects of the 1970's and early 1980's which developed methods for building natural language query interfaces, initially restricted to just one database, and later made "transportable" to many different applications. The further development of this technology into commercial software products will be discussed and illustrated by a survey of several current products, including both micro-computer NL systems and those offered on higher-performance machines. The qualities a user should look for in a NL interface will be considered, both in terms of linguistic capabilities and general ease of use. Finally, some of the remaining "hard problems" that current technology has not yet solved in a satisfactory way will be discussed. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at people who are not well acquainted with natural language interfaces and who would like to learn about 1) the capabilities of current systems, and 2) the technology that underlies these capabilities. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Carole D. Hafner is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. After receiving her Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan, she spent several years as a Staff Scientist at General Motors Research Laboratories working on the development of a natural language interface to databases. 1:30 5:30 THE ROLE OF LOGIC IN REPRESENTING MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE Robert C. Moore, SRI International ABSTRACT This tutorial will survey the use of logic to represent the meaning of utterances and the extra-linguistic knowledge needed to produce and interpret utterances in natural-language processing systems. Problems to be discussed in meaning representation include quantification, propositional attitudes, comparatives, mass terms and plurals, tense and aspect, and event sentences and adverbials. Logic-based methods (unification) for systematic specification of the correspondence between syntax and semantics in natural language processing systems will also be touched on. In the discussion of the representation of extra-linguistic knowledge, special attention will be devoted to the role played by knowledge of speakers' and hearers' mental states (particularly their knowledge and beliefs) in the generation and interpretation of utterances and logical formalisms for representing and reasoning about knowledge of those states. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at implementors of natural-language processing systems and others interested in logical approaches to the problems of meaning representation and knowledge representation in such systems. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Robert C. Moore is a staff scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International. Since joining SRI in 1977, Dr. Moore has carried out research on natural-language processing, knowledge representation, automatic deduction, and nonmonotonic reasoning. In 1986-87 he was the first director of SRI's Computer Science Research Centre in Cambridge, England. Dr. Moore received his PhD from MIT in 1979. 1:30 5:30 MACHINE TRANSLATION Sergei Nirenburg, Carnegie Mellon University ABSTRACT The central problems faced by a Machine Translation (MT) research project are 1) the design and implementation of automatic natural language analyzers and generators that manipulate morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge; and 2) the design, acquisition and maintenance of dictionaries and grammars. Since a short-term goal (or even medium term goal) of building a system that performs fully automated machine translation of unconstrained text is not feasible, an MT project must carefully constrain its objectives. This tutorial will describe the knowledge and processing requirements for an MT system. It will present and analyze the set of design choices for MT projects including distinguishing features such as long-term/short-term, academic/commercial, fully/partially automated, direct/transfer/interlingua, pre-/post-/interactive editing. The knowledge acquisition needs of an MT system, with an emphasis on interactive knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate the task of compiling the various dictionaries for an MT system will be discussed. In addition, expectations, possibilities and prospects for immediate application of machine translation technology will be considered. Finally, a brief survey of MT research and development work around the world will be presented. INTENDED AUDIENCE This tutorial is aimed at at a general audience that could include both students looking for an application area and testbed for their ideas in natural language processing and people contemplating starting an MT or machine-aided translation project. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dr. Sergei Nirenburg, Research Scientist at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University, holds an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from Kharkov State University, USSR, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He has published in the fields of parsing, generation, machine translation, knowledge representation and acquisition, and planning. Dr. Nirenburg is Editor of the journal Computers and Translation. SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Conference Committee General Chair Norman Sondheimer, USC/Information Sciences Institute Secretary-Treasurer Donald E. Walker, Bell Communications Research Program Committee Bruce Ballard (Chair), AT&T Bell Laboratories Madeleine Bates, BBN Laboratories Tim Finin, Unisys Ralph Grishman, New York University Carole Hafner, Northeastern University George Heidorn, IBM Corporation Paul Martin, SRI International Graeme Ritchie, University of Edinburgh Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments Tutorials Martha Palmer, Unisys Local Arrangements Jonathan Slocum, MCC (Chair) Elaine Rich, MCC Exhibits and Demonstrations Kent Wittenburg, MCC Publicity Jeffrey Hill and Brenda Nashawaty, Artificial Intelligence Corporation ------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: 6 December 1987, 18:22:13 EST Reply-To: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: MCCARTY@UTOREPAS Contibuted by Robert Amsler Subject: Reply to James H. Coombs `ACH Text markup' message (109 lines) (I'll make this reply public from the start since Nancy Ide already had to double-back and make her's public afterwards. It may, however, become a suitable topic for a more extended private discussion between those with an interest in text encoding standards.) As Nancy already noted, SGML is the most likely model which will be used for the Humanities Text Standard, however there was considerable concern at the meeting by the French delegation about the workshop endorsing SGML as the official standard to be emulated. In view of that, it was deemed essential to avoid specifically saying this in favor of the broader statement that we'd attempt to be compatible with applicable existing standards where possible. Specifically, this also includes character transliteration standards--which are a considerable part of a humanities text standard's encoding problems. (I can hardly wait for ISO to adopt an official standard for encoding Egyptian hieroglyphics in ASCII!) I would also however like to make a strong statement that from a computational perspective there is no need for any one format to be the only one used. What is needed is that any format must be fully documented and an information-preserving transformation of the contents of any approved standard format. This was captured in the statement that the standard would be an `interchange' format. This does beg the issue of how the transformation takes place, i.e. a program needs to be written or capable of being run on the `other' format and on hardware available to the recipient of the data, but it is important to note that an SGML-like format may appear as very formidable to users who believe they will have to type in all the special codes manually--whereas a `keyboarding' format may be just as faithful in representing the information without undo burden to the typist. I'm sure you will agree to this since your excellent CACM article notes that one of the most overlooked forms of markup is the use of traditional English punctuation and spacing conventions. Returning to your message's points, your 4th point seems to me to be exceptionally good and something that we did not explicitly get to in the Poughkeepsie meeting, i.e., ``4) There should be no attempt at establishing a "closed" tag set. The current AAP SGML application allows for definition of new tags, but it does not support such definition in a practical way. The consequence is that people will use "list items," for example, when they should be using "line of poetry." Within these guidelines, it can only be healthy to provide a list of tags that people should choose from when tagging certain entities. The point of this is that we cannot predict what textual elements wil