7.0272 Rs: PMC; Concording; Lab Designs (7/135)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Mon, 1 Nov 1993 08:11:24 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0272. Monday, 1 Nov 1993.


(1) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 18:08 GMT (7 lines)
From: George Aichele <0004705237@mcimail.com>
Subject: pmc address

(2) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 15:01:02 -0400 (EDT) (26 lines)
From: John Merritt Unsworth <jmu2m@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: 7.0269 Qs: PMC

(3) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 93 17:47:54 CST (23 lines)
From: "Jim Marchand" <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: concordance value

(4) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 11:29+0000 (15 lines)
From: Timothy.Reuter@MGH.BADW-MUENCHEN.D400.DE
Subject: 7.0268 Rs: Computer Work

(5) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 08:33:39 -0500 (EDT) (38 lines)
From: mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca (W. McCarty)
Subject: scholarship in concording

(6) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 11:34+0000 (14 lines)
From: Timothy.Reuter@MGH.BADW-MUENCHEN.D400.DE
Subject: Lab design

(7) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 93 12:14:32 PDT (12 lines)
From: cbf@athena.berkeley.edu (Charles Faulhaber)
Subject: Re: 7.0269 Qs: ... Lab Design

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 18:08 GMT
From: George Aichele <0004705237@mcimail.com>
Subject: pmc address

To reach the editors of Postmodern Culture, send email to
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu. The other pmc addresses now end @listserv.ncsu.edu.
George Aichele
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------47----
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 15:01:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Merritt Unsworth <jmu2m@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: 7.0269 Qs: PMC; GST; Lab Design; Heidegger/Cyberspace (3/93)

In answer to Michel Lenoble's question about PMC, the journal has moved
its listserv operations from ncsuvm. The new address for listserv
commands (sub, unsub, etc.) is

listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu

The listname, for listserv purposes, remains pmc-list, so you would
subscribe yourself by mailing a message to listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu with
the text:

sub pmc-list [your name here]

The email address for correspondence with the editors, submissions, etc.,
is:

pmc@unity.ncsu.edu

Finally, all published issues of pmc are available by anonymous ftp at
ftp.ncsu.edu, and can be found in the directory pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-list.

John Unsworth
Co-editor, PMC
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------36----
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 93 17:47:54 CST
From: "Jim Marchand" <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: concordance value

Judy and Cathy are both right, of course. I think it was Joseph Raben who
said "The technology which gave us the concordance will make it obsolete,"
or words to that effect. I am not sure that etexts are all that easily come
by, but I had a Middle High German text I wanted to use as illustration in a
class last week. It took me two hours and seven minutes to scan in the 3500
or so lines of MHG, about 30 minutes for cleanup. I could then make a
concordance using WordCruncher and show it to my class "online" as it were.
I don't know how much further I would have to go for a publishable
concordance, presumably a week-end's work, glossing and making bucs.
Putting it into WordPerfect format and getting it camera-ready is a
bagatelle. Unless I add some value, as Cathy said, I should get very little
credit if I submit such a work as a part of my portfolio for promotion.
Even if I had laboriously typed it in, I am not sure that that should count
for promotion, since it involves no scholarly work. So much for
concordances. But there are other uses of the computer for which one looks
for credit out there in the world at large. I am not sure that academe has
a good handle on kudology in general, but I know it does not for computer
work.
Jim Marchand.
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------34----
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 11:29+0000
From: Timothy.Reuter@MGH.BADW-MUENCHEN.D400.DE
Subject: 7.0268 Rs: Computer Work

Cathy Ball asks why _anyone_ should get the credit for a concordance in
these days of e-texts and freeware concordancers. The answer is that even
these days e-texts don't drop from heaven: they have to be prepared and
their structure marked up, and that means hard work and the exercise of
scholarly judgement (or at least that is what it _should_ mean). Deciding
on the format of the concordance as well as on what to leave out is also a
matter of scholarly judgement. That doesn't mean that _all_ concordances
should get kudos. In that respect, they're just like monographs: some
good, some bad, some mediocre.

Timothy Reuter, MGH Munich
(5) --------------------------------------------------------------56----
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 08:33:39 -0500 (EDT)
From: mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca (W. McCarty)
Subject: scholarship in concording

In Humanist 7.268, Cathy Ball wanted to know why anyone should get
kudos (which, by the way, is a singular noun, Greek, meaning "glory,
fame, renoun") for producing a concordance. Much depends on the nature
of the concordance. One can certainly imagine a concordance which to
produce would require little scholarly intervention. To the degree the
text would need to be prepared for concording, however, that
intervention might well be an absolute necessity. William Ingram and
Kathleen Swaim begin their introduction to _A Concordance to Milton's
Emglish Poetry_ (Oxford, 1972) by saying, "By now we have all grown
weary of being told how quickly and effortlessly concordances are
produced by computer.... while it is true that the computer expanded
the prepared text of Milton's English poetry into separate entries and
arranged those entries in alphabetical order in a matter of minutes,
it is equally true that the editorial preparation of the text, as the
necessary preliminary to this dazzling preformance, took several
years" (p. v). As in many things, "ars celare artem".

Consider also that even if the text is well edited and ready to go,
what we may wish to concord may not be the word-forms of the text
itself, but meta-textual forms, such as lemmas. These may be simply
grammatical lemmas (1st person singular, present indicative active
forms of verbs, for example), but they may also be "conceptual
lemmas".

There may be a use for us scholars still!

WM

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Willard McCarty
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
University of Toronto
mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca

(6) --------------------------------------------------------------33----
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 11:34+0000
From: Timothy.Reuter@MGH.BADW-MUENCHEN.D400.DE
Subject: Lab design

I've seen cableless connections for PCs (PC to screen and to other
peripheries); and I actually have a cableless mouse on the PC on which I'm
writing this. All work with infrared, as far as I know. Obviously you
couldn't do power supply like that: but you could design the floor so that
there were rows of plugs with cover flaps so that there was access to power
from anywhere in the lab. Then all you'd need to do is put your equipment
on trolleys (and of course, probably harder, make sure your network
software is not hostile to the cableless connections!)

Timothy Reuter MGH Munich
(7) --------------------------------------------------------------22----
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 93 12:14:32 PDT
From: cbf@athena.berkeley.edu (Charles Faulhaber)
Subject: Re: 7.0269 Qs: PMC; GST; Lab Design; Heidegger/Cyberspace (3/93)

Lab design.

For classes I think the best design is in rows with
all students facing the same way, and the capability
of large-screen projection at the front of the room.

Charles Faulhaber
UC Berkeley