4.1248 Collate -- SW for MSS Collation (1/88)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 17 Apr 91 22:22:30 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1248. Wednesday, 17 Apr 1991.
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 91 11:06 GMT
From: PETERR@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK (Peter Robinson)
Subject: Collate 1.0
Version 1.0 of Collate -- a new program for the collation of large
textual traditions -- is now available.
About Collate
----------------
Collate aims to help scholars in the preparation of a critical edition
based on many sources. It can collate simultaneously up to a hundred
texts at once. It can deal with richly marked-up texts (with special
treatment for editorial comments embedded in the text, location
markers, editorial expansions and separate collation of punctuation). It
provides powerful facilities to allow the scholar to tailor the collation
and it can output in many different formats.
Collate works interactively with the collation being written to a window
as the scholar watches. The scholar may intervene at any point to alter
the collation, using either of the tools RSet VariantS or RRegulariseS.
RSet VariantS allows the scholar to over-rule the collation offered by
Collate and impose his own collation, even writing a variant that does
not appear in the sources into the collation. RRegulariseS enables the
scholar to intervene to regularise any word or phrase in any source at
any point. The regularisation can be set for a particular word at every
point in every source, or for that word only at that place in that
source, or various other combinations. Collate will record all variants
set and every regularisation made and remember them next time it runs.
The scholar can adjust the collation in other ways, switching the base
text, suppressing agreements with the base text and collating
punctuation tokens separately.
The collation may be output in various critical apparatus forms
(including several formats recommended by the Text Encoding
Initiative), or scholars may dictate their own format. Through an
interface to the EDMAC macros, developed by John Lavagnino of
Brandeis University and Dominik Wujastyk of the Wellcome Institute
for the production of complex critical editions with the typesetting
language TeX, editions with up to five levels of apparatus can be created
direct from the output of Collate. The EDMAC macros and an
implementation of TeX (OzTeX) are provided with the program.
Automatic generation of hypertext electronic editions from the output is
also possible.
Texts Collate can Process
-----------------------------
The length of texts Collate can process is limited only by the storage
capacity of the computer. The only requirement is that the text be
divided into blocks containing no more than 32768 words each. Collate
works on both prose and verse and has been tested successfully on texts
in many languages (including Malay, Sanskrit, Latin, Middle English
and Old Norse).
A set of Guidelines for Transcription, provided with the program,
explains the format transcription files should have so that they can be
processed by Collate. The transcription files must be plain ASCII files
and can be prepared on any computer. A simple word-processor,
Transcribe, is also provided with Collate: this includes various
functions specially designed to help transcription.
The History of Collate
--------------------------
Collate has been developed as part of the Computers and Manuscripts
Project, funded for three years from 1st September 1989 by the
Leverhulme Trust at the Oxford University Computing Service with
support from Apple Computer. Collate has been written by the Research
Officer for the Project, Peter Robinson (PETERR@AC.UK.OX.VAX).
The Project Director is Susan Hockey.
Program Availability and Requirements
----------------------------------------------
Collate 1.0 runs only on Macintosh computers (Classic or higher) and
requires one megabyte of memory to operate. A hard disc is
recommended. It can be ordered from:
The Computers and Manuscripts Project
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
England.
(Phone: 0865 273200; fax 0865 273275; email
PETERR@AC.UK.OX.VAX).
The program costs #20 pounds UK, 40 dollars US. Cheques should be made
payable to the Oxford University Computing Service; cheques in pounds
must be drawn on a British bank.
Documentation, sample files, Transcribe (version 1.1) and the OzTeX
implementation of TeX for the Macintosh, together with the EDMAC
macros, are provided with the program.