4.0456 Responses: Greek; Citations; Handwriting (3/86)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 5 Sep 90 18:25:02 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0456. Wednesday, 5 Sep 1990.


(1) Date: Wed, 5 Sep 90 09:30:46 MDT (38 lines)
From: koontz@alpha.bldr.nist.gov (John E. Koontz)
Subject: Re: 4.0452 Morphological Analysis of Ancient Greek

(2) Date: Tue, 4 Sep 1990 9:10:34 GMT+0400 (27 lines)
From: Judy Koren <LBJUDY@VMSA.TECHNION.AC.IL>
Subject: RE: 4.0429 Citation Indexes

(3) Date: Wed, 05 Sep 90 08:37:05 EDT (21 lines)
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0449 Handwriting Technology

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 90 09:30:46 MDT
From: koontz@alpha.bldr.nist.gov (John E. Koontz)
Subject: Re: 4.0452 Morphological Analysis of Ancient Greek

I am aware of two sets of PC programs that might be relevant to the
problem of producing a morphological analysis of Ancient Greek forms.

1. The Summer Institute of Linguistics sells (cheaply) two programs which
can memorize analyses of forms and insert interlinear glosses under forms
in text or under their analyzed breakdown. Both programs allow
alternative analyses and work interactively. The programs are IT (c.
$60) and Shoebox (c. $15). IT is a system for producing texts with
aligned interlinear glosses. Shoebox is a dictionary/cultural notes
database system that has a glossing function built into it. IT's
glossing facilities are more elaborate, but it lacks the database
component.

2. SIL also sells (cheaply) several programs that do rule-based analysis
of morphological forms. These include PC-KIMMO and Ample.

For information on SIL software contact:

International Academic Bookstore
Summer Institute of Linguistics
7500 West Camp Wisdom Road
Dallas, TX 75236
214-709-2404.

Some specialized in-house materials are distributed by a subsidiary of
SIL, JAARS:

JAARS
PO Box 248
Waxhaw, NC 28173

Issue 9.5 (August 1990) of their newsletter Notes on Computing contains
an extensive list of these.

(2) --------------------------------------------------------------37----
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 1990 9:10:34 GMT+0400
From: Judy Koren <LBJUDY@VMSA.TECHNION.AC.IL>
Subject: RE: 4.0429 Citation Indexes

I use citation indexes quite a lot, and find them useful mainly for
keeping up with known authors (what did so-and-so write lately that I
may have missed?) or finding new authors with related interests (who
does so-and-so quote and who cites him? -- I meant "cite" not "quote"
of course. Darn these mail editors! >-: -- I suppose someone will
also catch the "him" instead of "him/her" or whatever, but I'm fed up
with these word-deep games of equality so will make no apology for that
one).

I find citation indexes (to get back to the point) less useful for
subject searches. Either the term is too wide and I'm deluged with
hundreds of articles, or if it's narrow enough to be useful, the chances
of its having been used in the title are not great. Probably the
sciences have less problems with that. A friend recently concocted the
title of his latest book by choosing all the keywords he wanted to
appear for computer retrieval purposes and combining them (or to be
exact, throwing them at me with a request to make grammatical English
out of them) with, I think, very satisfactory results; but how many of
us do that? The problem of course is that citation indexes use only
words from the title, as versus computer searches (Dialog etc.) which
scan also the abstract.

Judy Koren
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------29----
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 90 08:37:05 EDT
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0449 Handwriting Technology (3/39)

In response to the last three messages on this topic, (1) I was
originally suggesting discussion on the use of a pen to enter real text
into a computer, not just static bitmaps like MacPaint files. (2) There
is a difference again between the entering of text and the analysis of
previously written text (on paper). Certainly OCR with handwritten
characters would be nice, but it wouldn't save many of us much time.
For those that work with hand written manuscripts, though, it might be a
godsend. (3) In reponse to the last article about the one-handed
keyboard, yes, there have been (and are still, though I don't know the
details) five-key keyboards that use a chording system to enter all the
characters. The reports I've heard indicate that they take some getting
used to, but once you are proficient, you can use a chord keyboard much
faster than a normal one.

cheers ... Adam

Adam C. Engst pv9y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu