8.0019 OFFLINE 45 (1/537)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Fri, 20 May 1994 00:01:53 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0019. Friday, 20 May 1994.
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 21:34:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Kraft <kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: OFFLINE 45
Attached is the electronic form of the first post-Kraft OFFLINE column,
published already in hard copy, but supplied for this format as well.
As usual, you may do with it as you will. It will go onto the ccat
gopher, as indicated in the signoff paragraph. I hope these instructions
are still operative:
To access materials from the ccat gopher, University of
Pennsylvania, follow these procedures:
telnet gopher.upenn.edu
select Gopher Servers at Penn
select Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (ccat.sas)
follow the menus -- for example
select Electronic Publications
select Offline
Access is also possible from a WWW client, using the URL:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu
>From inside the University, point a Gopher client to
ccat.sas.upenn.edu (port 70)
Bob Kraft, UPenn
----------------------
<<O F F L I N E 4 5>>
Guest Coordinator: Patrick Durusau
[HUMANIST, IOUDAIOS, RELIGION, etc., 16 May 1994]
[Religious Studies News 9.2 (May 1994)]
[CSSR Bulletin 23.?]
[codes: <t>...</(t)> titles, <emph>...</> emphasis,
<h>/<h1>/<h2>...</(h)> levels of headings.]
----------------------
[Patrick Durusau, the guest coordinator for this issue, is
pursuing a Masters of Theological Studies degree at the Candler
School of Theology, Emory University. His interests include the
use of computers for the publication and analysis of religious
texts, particularly those of the Ancient Near East. He may be
contacted at: Patrick Durusau, P.O. Box 81126, Conyers, GA 30208
or pdurusau@crl.com.]
When the Oxford English Dictionary completes its next edition in
2005, the following definition may appear for the term "computing
humanist." "Computing humanist: Anachronism, original use was to
designate humanists who used computers in teaching, research and
analysis. Not unlike lexica, concordances and the codex form of
written materials, computers are now an unremarked part of a
scholars tools." Robert Kraft, through the Offline column and
other efforts, has brought the seamless integration of computers
into religious studies closer to reality. We thank him for
introducing us to the potential and practice of humanities
computing and for helping us to negotiate the passage to this new
medium of research and communication.
The Offline column seeks to continue that tradition, emphasizing
the broad variety of tools that are now available for the scholar
of religion. In order to serve the divergent audience of
readers, which ranges from novice to Unix Wizard, articles will
address computer topics at a full range of skill and experience
levels. This issue includes: Net-News (new or important
resources from the Internet), Hard-Copy (articles and reference
material available in non-electronic format) and Soft-Bytes
(software for scholars). Your suggestions, articles, notices,
requests for specific topics and comments are always welcome.
As always, Offline depends upon your support. Offline is made
possible by the generous contributions of our readers who forward
notices, announcements and other material for inclusion in this
column. Due to space limitations, author's names accompany
submitted articles only. Readers who forwarded other material
for this issue of Offline include: Avi Hyman, Jeffrey Mirus,
Sigrid Peterson and Dylan Tweney. Please forward comments and
contributions to Beth Mackie at bmackie@unix.cc.emory.edu or at
the address listed on page 2.
<h>Net-News</>
<h1>New List: TECHEVAL</>
A new listserv, entitled TECHEVAL, provides an open forum for
discussing the evaluation of computer related work in the
humanities. The address is: TECHEVAL@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU.
You may subscribe in the usual way. Send a message to
LISTSERV@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU.
You can leave the subject line blank. The message should read as
follows:
subscribe TECHEVAL your@email.address firstname lastname
If you have any questions, send an e-msg to
JSOSNOSKI@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU
One of the purposes for instituting this list is to collect
information and points of view on the evaluation of computer-
related work in language and literary study for the Modern
Language Association's Emerging Technologies Committee.
<h1>Project Muse: A New Venture In Electronic Scholarly
Communication</>
In one of the first joint ventures of its kind, the Johns Hopkins
University Press, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, and Homewood
Academic Computing have joined forces to launch Project Muse, an
initiative that enables networked electronic access to the
Press's scholarly journals. This collaboration draws the Johns
Hopkins University community together to move scholarly
communication into the electronic age and develop an economic
model that addresses rising costs and diminishing budgets.
The first phase of the project, completed in February 1994, is a
freely accessible prototype consisting of current issues of
<t>Configurations</>, MLN (<t>Modern Language Notes</>), and ELH
(<t>English Literary History</>). The fully formatted text of
these journals is now available on the Internet via on-line
access to the library's server (http://muse.mse.jhu.edu).
Features include subject, title, and author indexes; instant
hypertext links to tables of contents, endnotes and
illustrations; Boolean searches of text and tables of contents;
and voice and textual annotations. Several members of the
scholarly community at Johns Hopkins have already used this
resource, and one professor describes it as "an intelligent,
incredibly easy system to use... an actual research tool."
The prototype is accessed through a networked hypermedia
information retrieval system known as the World Wide Web (WWW).
It can be viewed and searched using any of a number of freely
available WWW readers, but runs optimally under the Mosaic reader
developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
(There will be more details about Mosaic in a future column).
Users of Mosaic can annotate text, record paths taken during on-
line sessions, download text for printing, and create "hot lists"
of frequently accessed documents. Mosaic readers are available
for a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Mac, and
Windows machines. Users of the prototype may send comments and
suggestions with the on-line form provided in the prototype or
via regular e-mail (ejournal@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu).
The short-range goals of the prototype are the creation of an
easy-to-use electronic-journal environment with searching and
multimedia features that cannot be duplicated in print, and the
collection of data on amounts and types of usage for an access
and costing model. Long-range goals are to offer reasonably
priced electronic journals to university libraries and to use on-
line technology to make works of scholarship more widely
available within individual university communities.
If funding for capital costs can be raised, the project team aims
to mount about forty of the Press's journals in math, the
humanities, and the social sciences. These issues will appear on
a prepublication basis and will be available electronically a few
weeks in advance of the printed version. Beyond developing a
prototype, Project Muse has enabled the university press, the
library, and the computing center to engage in a meaningful
dialogue about the current state of the scholarly communication
process. This dialogue should not only influence the final
appearance, price, and distribution method of the Press's on-line
journals, but the shape of scholarly publishing in the
information age.
For additional information, contact Susanna Pathak, Project Muse
Team, Johns Hopkins, spathak@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu.
<h1>Internet Access to SGML Textual Analysis Resources</>
The University of Virginia Library is pleased to announce the
Internet-accessibility of several of its text collections indexed
with Open Text's PAT search engine. With the permission of Open
Text Corporation and depositors of the texts included in this
effort, they are now able to provide client/server access to
several collections, including a growing body of Middle English
texts, the King James and Revised Standard Versions of the Bible,
and the Michigan Early Modern English Materials.
Although no remote login to the University of Virginia system
will be supported, access is possible through several client
software packages, including Open Text's PatMotif and a freely
available vt100 client developed by the University of Virginia.
A full description of the client software and the textual
resources offered is available via anonymous ftp from
etext.virginia.edu (128.143.22.16), as /pub/announce
(URL: file://etext.virginia.edu/pub/announce).
<h1>Kovacs' Directory Eight Edition</>
As of March, 1994, the Eight Edition of Diane Kovacs' Directory
of Scholarly Electronic Conferences has been released.
Electronic conferences is used in its broadest sense and includes
Internet interest groups, discussion lists, Usenet newsgroups, e-
journals and e-newsletters that are of interest to scholars. This
directory provides access information for each conference listed
and is organized by subject areas.
Since its original release, Kovacs' Directory has been available
in both print format and free electronic copy. I find this dual
distribution method, which provides maximum access for all
readers, a useful model for the dissemination of scholarly
information. The success of this model in providing scholarly
information, should give pause to the advocates of access-as
privilege proposals.
Access information is available from the listserv@kentvm.bitnet
or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu by sending the message get acadlist
readme. By anonymous FTP to ksuvxa.kent.edu in the directory
PUB/LIBRARY or gopher to gopher.cni.org (among others). For
print editions, please contact Ann Okerson, ann@cni.org.
<h1>Ur 3 Project Texts</>
There is now an ftp server at the University Museum of the
University of Pennsylvania on which Sumerian texts in a standard
ASCII transliteration format have been archived. This site is
intended to be, amongst other things, the U.S. distribution point
of the Leiden Ur 3 project. FTP to enlil.museum.upenn.edu in the
directory E:\pub\Ur3. This directory contains Sumerian texts from
the Ur III period.
The texts were transliterated using characters from the ASCII
alphabet only. The file CONVNTNS.TXT contains the list of
conventions which were used in making the transliterations. As
the text files will be updated at intervals, any suggestions for
improving the transliterations are welcome. For questions or
suggestions regarding the transliterations, please contact Remco
de Maaijer and/or Bram Jagersma: JAGERSMA@RULUB.LEIDENUNIV.NL.
For questions or suggestions regarding this FTP-site and related
computer matters, contact Steve Tinney:
STEVE.TINNEY@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU or sjt@enlil.museum.upenn.edu.
Texts currently available include: texts from the Aleppo museum,
P.J. Watson, <t>Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City
Museum</>, Vol. 1, <t>Neo-Sumerian Texts from Drehen; L.W. King,
Cuneiform texts from Babylonian tablets in the British Museum</>,
Part XXXII (= CT 32), London 1912; and others.
<h>Hard-Copy</>
<h1>Infolingua</>
Readers working with computers for the analysis of languages or
texts, will be pleased to learn of the publication of this series
of bibliographic reference works. These works were composed in
part from contributions of scholars working in these areas or
from solicitations sent over the Internet. I have not yet seen a
hard copy of these works, but the volume <t>Literary Computing</>
contains over 500 references dealing with religious materials,
with over 85% of those concerned with the Bible. These works
should provide a useful reference for advanced researchers as
well as those seeking a basic grounding in this area of growing
importance.
For further information, please contact Infolingua Inc., P.O. Box
187 Snowdon, Montreal Qc, H3X 3T3, Canada, or email:
73651.2144@compuserve.com.
<h2>Computational Morphology</>: Morphological Analysis and Generation,
Lemmatization: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 492p.
<h2>Computational Parsing</>: Syntactic Analysis, Semantic Analysis,
Semantic Interpretation, Parsing Algorithms, Parsing Strategies:
Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1029p.
<h2>Computational Lexicology And Lexicography</>: Dictionaries,
Thesauri, Term Banks ; Analysis, Transfer and Generation
Dictionaries ; Machine Readable Dictionaries ; Lexical Semantics
; Lexicon Grammars: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2
volumes, 1031p.
<h2>Computational Text Understanding</>: Natural Language
Programming, Argument Analysis: Bibliography, by Conrad F.
Sabourin 1994, 657p.
<h2>Computational Text Generation</>: Generation from Data or
Linguistic Structure, Text Planning, Sentence Generation,
Explanation Generation: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin with
a survey article by Mark T. Maybury 1994, 649p.
<h2>Natural Language Interfaces</>: Interfaces to Databases, to
Expert Systems, to Robots, to Operating Systems, and to Question-
Answering Systems: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2
volumes, 847p.
<h2>Machine Translation</>: Aids to Translation, Speech
Translation: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin and Laurent R.
Bourbeau 1994, 2 volumes, 1168p.
<h2>Literary Computing</>: Style Analysis, Author Identification,
Text Collation, Literary Criticism: Bibliography, by Conrad F.
Sabourin 1994, 581p.
<h2>Computer Assisted Language Teaching</>: Teaching Vocabulary,
Grammar, Spelling, Writing, Composition, Listening, Speaking,
Translation, Foreign Languages ; Text Composition Aids, Error
Detection and Correction, Readability Analysis: Bibliography, by
Conrad F. Sabourin and Elca Tarrab 1994, 2 volumes, 1066p.
<h2>Computer Mediated Communication</>: Computer Conferencing,
Electronic Mail, Electronic Publishing, Computer Interviewing,
Interactive Text Reading, Group Decision Support Systems, Idea
Generation Support Systems, Human-Machine Communication, Multi-
Media Communication, Hypertext, Hypermedia, Linguistic Games:
Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 862p.
<h2>Electronic Document Processing</>: Document Editing,
Formatting, Typesetting, Coding, Storing, Interchanging,
Managing: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 551p
<h2>Computational Character Processing</>: Character Coding,
Input, Output, Synthesis, Ordering, Conversion ; Text
Compression, Encryption, Display ; Hashing ; Literate
Programming: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 580p.
<h2>Quantitative And Statistical Linguistics</>: Frequencies of
Characters, Phonemes, Words, Grammatical Categories, Syntactic
Structures ; Lexical Richness, Word Collocations, Entropy, Word
Length, Sentence Length: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin
1994, 508p.
<h2>Mathematical and Formal Linguistics</>: Grammar Formalisms,
Grammar Testing, Logics, Quantifiers: Bibliography, by Conrad F.
Sabourin 1994, 612p.
<h2>Computational Speech Processing</>: Speech Analysis,
Recognition, Understanding, Compression, Transmission, Coding,
Synthesis ; Text to Speech Systems, Speech to Tactile Displays,
Speaker Identification, Prosody Processing: Bibliography, by
Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1187p.
<h2>Computational Linguistics in Information Science</>:
Information Retrieval (Full-Text or Conceptual), Automatic
Indexing, Text Abstraction, Content Analysis, Information
Extraction, Query Languages: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin
1994, 2 volumes, 1047p.
<h2>Optical Character Recognition and Document Segmentation</>:
Character Preprocessing, Thinning, Isolation, Segmentation,
Feature Extraction ; Cursive and Multi-Font Recognition,
Writer/Scriptor Identification: Bibliography, by Conrad F.
Sabourin 1994, 512p.
<h>Soft-Bytes</>
<h1>Free Document Imaging Package</>
Scholars have used a variety of strategies to deal with the
paper-intensive nature of the scholarly enterprise. From the
note-cards that contain our library research to the conference
papers that we would like to find for class discussion, scholars
have devised a number of ad hoc ways to file and more
importantly, find, needed information. One new strategy, made
possible by personal computers, is the scanning and indexing of
important information for later retrieval. In the jargon of the
computer world, this scanning and indexing of material is known
as the "Paperless Office."
In its simplest form, this approach requires that the document be
scanned and that image of the document be saved and assigned the
key-words that will be used to index it for retrieval. It does
require an investment of time for scanning and indexing as well
as storage space for the images of the documents. If you are
interested in exploring this approach to the storing and
retrieval of documents, Omega has a special education offer that
may be of interest.
For a limited time, Omega is offering special educational
packages of FilePlus, The Paperless Document Image Processing and
File Management System, free to all students, teachers, and
educational institutions (service fee of $30.00). Contact
omega@canrem.com, or Omega, 1599 Hurontario St, Suite 301,
Mississauga, Ontario, L5G 4S1, Attention: Dorothy Wasiak Tel
:(905)891-3478 Fax :(905)891-7757 Information also available via
modem at (905)681-3213.
This software requires: an IBM PC Compatible 386sx or higher, 4MB
of RAM, 10MB hard disk (minimum), DOS 3.3 or later, Microsoft
Windows 3.1 or higher, Document scanner and Windows-compatible
mouse.
<h1>TLG Workplace 3.0 and PHI Workplace 3.0</>
Users of the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and the PHI (Packard
Humanities Institute) CD ROMs will be pleased to learn of the
recent upgrade of one of the retrieval software packages for
those collections. For those unfamiliar with these CDs, the TLG
includes Greek texts from approximately 800 BCE until 600 CE,
with some later texts and the PHI collection focuses on Latin
literature until 200 CE. This software allows searching and
printing of the texts found in these collections.
A demonstration version of the TLG Workplace is available from
oak.oakland.edu in the directory pub/msdos/cdrom/tlgwp301.zip.
This demonstration version cannot print or copy text to the
clipboard. It is otherwise fully functional. For further
information on these programs, contact John Baima, Silver
Mountain Software, 1029 Tanglewood, Cedar Hill, TX 755104-3019,
john@ling.uta.edu.
<h1>DOS Internet Kit</>
Dean Pentcheff (dean2@tbone.biol.scarolina.edu) has collected
public domain programs that allow PCs with Ethernet or SLIP
connections to access Internet services. The package includes
programs for DOS as well as Windows systems. This collection is
available by anonymous FTP at tbone.biol.scarolina.edu in the
directory pub/kit. Remember to use binary transfer and get
disk1.exe, disk2.exe and 00readme.doc.
<h1>Desktop Internet Reference</>
If you have questions about what resources are available on the
Internet or how obtain/use those resources, there are few
starting places better than the Desktop Internet Reference. This
software program has collected 1,800 pages of materials on topics
ranging from on-line libraries to listservs and more. It is
presently available for in DOS and Windows versions, with a Mac
version in the planning. This program is available by anonymous
FTP at ftp.uwp.eud in the directory pub/msdos/dir as ddir10.zip
(DOS file) or wdir10.zip (Windows file). Use binary transfer when
obtaining these files.
<h1>TACT-Textual Analysis Computing Tools 2.1 gamma</>
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities has recently released
a major revision of TACT, its Textual Analysis Computing Tools
package. As described in the readme file that accompanies the
release, "(TACT)... a system of 15 programs for MS-DOS, is
designed to do text-retrieval and analysis on literary works.
Typically, researchers use TACT to retrieve occurrences of a
word, word pattern, or word combination. Output takes the form
of a concordance, a list, or a table. Programs also can do
simple kinds of analysis, such as sorted frequencies of letters,
words or phrases, type-token statistics, or ranking of collocates
to a word by their strength of association."
This collection of programs offers an inexpensive yet powerful
set of tools to allow scholars to explore computer aided analysis
of textual materials. One recent example of the usefulness of
TACT can be found in <t>Mapping Echoes with TACT in the Old
French Epic the Charroi de Ni^mes</> by Edward A. Heinemann,
which appears in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 8, No.
4, at pages 191-202 (1993). Heinemann's analysis was carried out
with an earlier version of TACT, but clearly illustrates the
capabilities of these programs.
TACT requires a standard MS-DOS platform with 640K RAM
(preferably up to 16Mb additional memory); DOS 3.x or above; a
large hard disk (the uncompressed installed programs occupy about
3.2Mb); and a -386 or faster processor. For those scholars who do
not have a -386 or faster processor, TACT 1.2B is still available
at the Gopher and FTP sites listed below. (Note, TACT 1.2 was the
version used by Heinemann in the analysis noted above.)
<h1>Access to TACT 2.1 gamma</>:
Gopher: TACT 2.1 gamma may be obtained by Gopher to
gopher.epas.utoronto.ca in the following subdirectory: 5. Centre
for Computing in the Humanities/ 4.Humanities Computing Resources
/ 6. Software /1. Textual Analysis Computing Tools /2. TACT 2.1
gamma.
FTP: Use anonymous FTP to epas.utoronto.ca and move to the
pub/cch/tact/tact2.1gamma directory. Type prompt to turn off the
interactive prompts and then binary prior to transfer of the
files. Then type mget *.* and all of the files will be sent to
you. Remember to use zmodem or other error correcting transfer
protoccols when downloading these files to your microcomputer.
(TACT 1.2B is also available at pub/cch/tact/dist1.2B)
By mail: TACT Distribution, Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, Robarts Library, Room 14297A, University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5, CANADA. Atn.: Elke Rudman.
<h1>Stylometry Software</>
Stylometry is an effort to assign quantitative values to the use
of language by an individual. In cases of authorship, it is one
tool to test the attribution of a text to one author rather than
another. It does not give definitive answers to authorship
questions, but does generate additional evidence to be considered
by scholars concerned with questions of style and attribution of
authorship. Robert A. J. Matthews and Thomas V. N. Merriam, in
<t>Neural Computation in Stylometry I: An Application to the
Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher</>, <t>Literary and Linguistic
Computing</>, Vol. 8, No. 4, at pp. 203-209 (1993) develop a new
stylometric method based upon the use of a neural network
computation technique known as back propagation. While the
limitations of space prohibit more than the mention of this new
technique, the authors have offered to make .EXE files containing
fully trained multi-layer perceptions using Merriam and Horton
discriminators available to anyone sending a blank IBM-compatible
3.5" disk and return postage. Address your request to: Robert
Matthews, 50 Norreys Road, Cumnor, Oxford OX2 9PT, UK.
<h>Correction</>
The OFFLINE 44 column mentions that Richard Wevers has a program
for helping one learn vocabulary and verb forms and declension of
Greek. Unfortunately the e-mail address is listed incorrectly.
The correct listing is weve@ursa.calvin.edu.
<----->
[Proposals for OFFLINE: Since Robert Kraft will no longer be
coordinating OFFLINE, <t>Religious Studies News</> is looking for
someone to continue his work as Coordinator. Proposals addressing
the overall direction and scope of the column as well as
proposals for a single column as guest coordinator are welcome.
We are looking for ways to include sections which are helpful for
readers at various levels of computer expertise and sections
which cover as many aspects of academic computing as feasible.
Please send proposals to Beth Mackie, Editor RSN, PO Box 15399,
Atlanta GA 30333.]
A complete electronic file of OFFLINE columns is available upon
request (for IBM/DOS, Mac, or IBYCUS), or from the ccat.sas
gopher at gopher.upenn.edu (Penn gophers). To request printed
information or materials from OFFLINE, please supply an
appropriately sized, self-addressed envelope or an address label
to Robert A. Kraft, Box 36 College Hall, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104-6303. Telephone (215) 898-
5827. Internet address: Kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (please note
that the previous BITNET address is no longer operational).
//end #45//