19.566 scholarly editions

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 566.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 06:32:11 +0000
         From: "Joseph Raben" <joeraben_at_cox.net>
         Subject: Re: 19.544

Picking up the thread on scholarly editions, I would like to call
attention to an article by Todd K. Bender, "Literary Texts in
Electronic Storage: The Editorial Potential," published almost 30
years ago in Computers and the Humanities, 10:4 (July/August 1976),
193-199. I admired then and still do, Bender's remarkably prescient
description of the manner in which the various states of a text can
be simultaneously stored and displayed, and of some of the benefits
to the literary critic of being able to examine them all in many
aspects. His central thesis is summed up as follows: "If we are to
make sophisticated analyses
of style in natural language, it is evident that we must see the
vocabulary of the author not as single items, but as constellations
of information in sets of complex variables, which can fit easily
into the physical
format of electronic data" (197). Interested readers without easy
access to a file of CHum can
request a copy of the paper from Bender at
<mailto:tkbender_at_wisc.edu>tkbender_at_wisc.edu.
Received on Fri Jan 20 2006 - 01:56:09 EST