March
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 76. Sunday, 29 Mar 1992. Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 11:37:00 -0500 From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Subject: Humanities Computing Summer Seminar This announcement is cross-posted on a number of lists. We apologize for any inconvenience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CENTER FOR ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE HUMANITIES Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Methods and Tools August 9-21, 1992 Summer Seminar, Princeton University, New Jersey Co-sponsored by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto This first Summer Seminar of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) will address a wide range of challenges and opportunities that electronic texts and software offer to teachers and scholars in the humanities. Discussions on text creation, markup, retrieval, presentation, and analysis will prepare the participant for extensive hands-on experience with illustrative software packages, such as MTAS, Micro-OCP, WordCruncher, Tact, Collate, Beowulf Workstation, Perseus, and CD-Word. Systems of markup, from ad hoc schemes to the systematic approach of the Text Encoding Initiative, will be surveyed and considered. The focus of the Seminar will be practical and methodological, concerned with the demonstrable benefits of using electronic texts in teaching and research, the typical problems one encounters and how to solve them, and the ways in which software fits or can be adapted to methods common amongst the humanities. Participants will be given the opportunity to work on a coherent project. Those with projects already in progress or preparation will be encouraged to bring them; texts and exercises will be provided for those without a specific project in mind. The seminar is intended for researchers, librarians and computer center advisers who have basic computing experience, but little or no experience of computers in a humanities research environment. The number of participants will be limited to 26. Schedule Week 1, August 9-14, 1992 Sunday, August 9. Registration Monday, August 10. The electronic text a.m. What is an electronic text and where to find them; survey of existing inventories, archives, and other current resources. History of computer-assisted text analysis in the humanities. Introduction to simple concordancing with MTAS, including practical session. p.m. Creating and capturing texts in electronic form; keyboard entry vs. optical scanning. Demonstration of optical character-recognition technology. Introduction to text encoding, surveying ad hoc methods, e.g. COCOA, WordCruncher, TLG beta code; problems of these methods. Systematic approach of the Text Encoding Initiative. Practical exercise in deciding what to encode in typical texts. Tuesday, August 11. Concordancing a.m. A focussed look at computer-assisted concordance generation; types of concordances, their specific advantages and disadvantages. Alphabetization, character sequences, sorting, and forms of presentation. Introduction to Micro-OCP; practical session in its use. p.m. Further work on concordancing with Micro-OCP. Wednesday, August 12. The interactive concordance a.m. Indexed, interactive retrieval vs. batch concordance generation. Textual problems particularly suitable to an interactive system; the continuing use of concordances in hardcopy. Preparation of text for indexed retrieval; differing roles of markup and external "rules"; kinds of displays; post-processing of displays. Introduction to Tact. p.m. Practical work using Tact: simple markup, compilation of a textual database, and methods of inquiry. Thursday, August 13. Stylistics a.m. Stylistic comparisons and authorship studies using concordance tools; basic statistics for lexical and stylistic analysis. Case studies, e.g. Federalist Papers, Kenny on Aristotle, Burrows on Jane Austen. p.m. Practical session using Micro-OCP and/or Tact for stylistic analysis. Friday, August 14. Critical editions a.m. Overview of tools for preparing critical editions. Constructing glossaries and material for commentary; application of Micro-OCP and/or Tact. p.m. Collation; single-text vs. multiple-text methods. Overview of software tools. Introduction to Collate. Week 2, August 17-20, 1992 Monday, August 17. Text analysis a.m. Review of the previous week's work. Discussion on the limitations of existing software. Advanced analytical tools not commonly available, e.g. pattern recognizers, lemmatization systems, morphological analyzers, parsers; overview of these. p.m. Simple, practical morphological analysis and lemmatization with Micro-OCP and/or Tact. Tuesday, August 18. Developing and Extending Current Resources a.m. How far do existing textual databases and software go towards satisfying the needs of teachers and scholars, e.g WordCruncher (ETC) texts, Oxford Electronic Texts, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), the ARTFL database, the Dante Database? How these are accessed and used. p.m. The electronic dictionary; from machine-readable dictionary to computational lexicon. What the New OED and other online dictionaries can do for the scholar. Uses of lexical knowledge bases in text retrieval. Building a simple online lexicon with Tact. Wednesday, August 19. Hypertext a.m. Hypertext and hypermedia: alternative or complementary approaches to text analysis and presentation? Overview of some ongoing hypertextual projects in the humanities: Beowulf Workstation, Perseus, CD-Word. What essential role does hypertext play in these? How might hypertext and concordancing methods be combined? p.m. Practical session in building a hypertextual system, using HyperCard or Guide. A brief look at Annota. Thursday, August 20. Projects (1) a.m. Illustration of how to tackle projects using one of the methods covered earlier in the seminar; beginning of practical work. a.m. Practical work continued. Friday, August 21. Projects (2) a.m. Practical work continued. p.m. Concluding discussion of methodologies and problems. Do the results justify the amount of work involved? How is one's perspective on text changed by using automatic methods? What can one learn from the collision of these methods with intuitive perceptions? How can the machine better assist the educated imagination? CETH The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities was established in October 1991 by Rutgers and Princeton Universities with external support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is intended to become a national focus of interest in the U.S. for those who are involved in the creation, dissemination and use of electronic texts in the humanities, and it will act as a national node on an international network of centers and projects which are actively involved in the handling of electronic texts. Developed from the international inventory of machine-readable texts which was begun at Rutgers in 1983 and is held on RLIN, the Center is now reviewing the records in the inventory and continues to catalog new texts. The acquisition and dissemination of text files to the community is another important activity, concentrating on a selection of good quality texts which can be made available over Internet with suitable retrieval software and with appropriate copyright permission. The Center also acts as a clearinghouse on information related to electronic texts, directing enquirers to other sources of information. Instructors The seminar will be taught by Willard McCarty and Susan Hockey, with assistance from Hannah Kaufman, Toby Paff and Mary Sproule. Willard McCarty has been active in humanities computing since 1977. With its founding Director, Ian Lancashire, he helped to set up the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, of which he is now the Assistant Director. He was the founding editor of Humanist, the principal electronic seminar for computing humanists, and has edited several other publications in the field. He regularly gives talks, papers, and lectures throughout North America and Europe. McCarty took his Ph.D. in English literature in 1984; his current literary research is in classical studies, especially the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. In support of a forthcoming book, he has an electronic edition of that poem underway for the text-retrieval program Tact. Susan Hockey is Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Before moving to the USA in October 1991, she spent 16 years at Oxford University Computing Service where her most recent position was Director of the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Textual Studies. At Oxford she was responsible for various humanities computing projects including the development of the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP), an academic typesetting service for British universities, and OCR scanning. She has taught courses on humanities computing for fifteen years and has given numerous guest lectures on various aspects of computing in the humanities. She is the author of three books and numerous articles on humanities computing and has been Chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing since 1984. She is a member (currently Chair) of the Steering Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative. Hannah Kaufman, Toby Paff and Mary Sproule are all on the staff of Computing and Information Technology's Information Services at Princeton University. Each of them has worked extensively with humanities scholars. Hannah Kaufman's special skills include the design and use of full text and bibliographic databases; Toby Paff has worked on designing fonts and analyzing non-Roman texts; and Mary Sproule has extensive experience with critical editions and instructional technology. The seminar will include visiting talks in the evenings on specific topics or research projects, as well as the role of the library in the use of electronic texts. Fees The cost of participating in this Summer Seminar will be $850, including tuition, meals and lodging at Princeton for the two weeks. Students pay a reduced rate of $750. Tuition, lunch and dinner only will be $650. Application Procedure To apply for participation in this Summer Seminar, submit a statement of interest of no longer than one page, indicating how participating in the Seminar will affect your teaching, research or support, and possibly that of your colleagues, in Humanities Computing in the coming year. Applications must be attached to a cover sheet containing name, position, affiliation, postal and email addresses, and phone and fax numbers, as available, as well as natural language interest and computing experience. Students must also include a photocopy of a valid student ID. The statement must be received by the reviewing committee, consisting of members of the Center's Governing Board, by May 15, 1992, at the address below. Those who have been selected to attend will be notified by June 1, 1992. Payment will be requested at this time. Summer Seminar 1992 Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities 169 College Avenue New Brunswick, NJ 08903 U.S.A. phone: (908) 932-1384 fax: (908) 932-1386 email: ceth@zodiac (bitnet)This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (internet)
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 75. Sunday, 29 Mar 1992. Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 09:20:00 -0500 From: Luc Borot <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: TAGGING Dear fellow SHAKSPEReans, This note is the first Montpellier contribution to the discussion on tagging on SHAKSPER. Number 42 of *Cahiers Elisabethains* (Oct.92) will include a review by Patricia Dorval and myself of several e-edit- ions of Shakespeare and Milton, including those on our server, and of Michael Best's MARVELLOUSissima (sorry for the coinage) Hypercard stack *Shakespeare's Life and Times*, plus the captivating and hyper-simple concordance programme *Gconc*. The research I am currently on for the Hobbes seminar of the CNRS in Paris concerns reason of state in the 17th century. I have scanned the text of two aphoristical treatises by the machiavellian republican of the 1650-s James Harrington and I have applied Gconc to them. The tag- ging I used for these 2 brief texts concerned only the text's subdivi- sions. Gconc can endure many different kinds of tagging for concordance-gener- ation if the user takes good care of the parameters he enters in the option-windows. I am just only discovering the problems of this type of textual studies and editions, but my feeling is that we should wonder for what use we are tagging the texts for ourselves or for our col- leagues on the network. Are we tagging for concordance analysis, for later treatment with a word-processor (and here the typographical data such as italics and caps are necessary if we want our collaborators to recover the presentation of the original. In many cases (working from the 2 versions of the sonnets posted by Hardy Cook, The Wells-Taylor Electronic Shakespeare by OUP, the Milton published by Shakespeare on Disk and my own scanned texts) I have realised that concordances could be used with more efficiency in a modern spelling edition (Pr Jean Fu- zier, editor and translator of the *Sonnets* appreciated Hardy Cook's editions and stresses that if a philologist wanted to compare the uses of than and then in this work, he'd have to resort to a modern-spelling edition though he personally preferred to use an old-spelling one to analyse prosody and rhetoric). Ken's tagging reminded me of the RTF (rich text format) code introduced by Mac word processors in a specific recording format. The trouble is that it will always hinder the work of the concordance software if the latter is not formatted to cater for this type of code. That's all for the moment. As our work on the question progresses I'll let you hear more about our discoveries and silly blunders. Fare ye well. Luc BOROT in Montpellier (France, not Vermont!...) <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 74. Sunday, 29 Mar 1992. (1) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 04:36:48 -0500 From: Simon Rae <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subj: RE: SHK 3.0069 Oxford and the Authorship Question (2) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 08:36:00 -0500 From: Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subj: Review of Stratford, ONT *Othello* (3) Date: 27 Mar 92 12:46:00 EST From: "NAOMI LIEBLER" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subj: RE: SHK 3.0070 Q: Performance Reviews (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 04:36:48 -0500 From: Simon Rae <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: 3.0069 Oxford and the Authorship Question Comment: RE: SHK 3.0069 Oxford and the Authorship Question > Perhaps the real answer is that they > are all by the recently, very recently, late Robert Maxwell; > or perhaps Richard Ingrams wrote them with the help of > Ian Hyslop. I'm sure I could work out a case for any of > these if I had the time. > William Proctor Williams TB0wpw1@NIU I find myself in two minds over this ... as someone lucky enough to have lived within theatre-going distance of the RSC at Stratford and having seen some memorable performances/performers there over the past 25/30 years I have never been too bothered about who wrote the words - be it a local yocal or a courtly knob, the event of attendance and 'being there' was more than enough. However age and study in other subjects has made me aware that exactly who wrote the words is important on some (different perhaps) levels - so yes ... it is important that some do not just accept the obvious (?) and tag them all as Will c/o Stratford. It is difficult enough to prove the facts behind what happened yesterday to ever assume that we know what happened 3/400 years ago. BUT I would love to see a proof that Ian Hyslop helped Richard Ingrams write them... hell! I was watching them almost before he was born! Come on William Proctor Williams - show me. Simon Rae - User Services Officer, Academic Computing Service, The Open University, Walton Hall, MILTON KEYNES, MK7 6AA, UK. phone: 0908 652413 fax: 0908 653744 e-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - JANET (UK)This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - World (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 08:36:00 -0500 From: Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: Review of Stratford, ONT *Othello* Luis Gamez will find a review of the Stratford, ONT *Othello* embedded in a review of the whole Stratford '87 season by Daniel J. Watermeier in *SQ* 39, no. 2 (Summer 1988), pp. 229-30. Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > (3)----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 27 Mar 92 12:46:00 EST From: "NAOMI LIEBLER" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: 3.0070 Q: Performance Reviews Comment: RE: SHK 3.0070 Q: Performance Reviews For Lou Gamez, seeking reviews of 1987 Stratford (Ont.) *Othello* and London *Coriolanus*: get in touch with June Schlueter, who is (I think) a member of this SHAKSPER network, and who is also co-editor of *Shakespeare Bulletin*. Hardly a production of ANYTHING Shakespearean is missed by that journal. I'll bet you'll find at least one review of both plays there. Better yet, subscribe! The *pony-express* (vs. e-mail) address is Department of English, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 73. Thursday, 26 Mar 1992. [Ed. Note: A while back, I posted an announcement on SHAKSPER for a "Public Domain" text of Shakespeare available free from Grady Ward. Hardy Cook has obtained a copy via surface mail, and we have been deliberating about the legalities of posting it on the SHAKSPER Fileserver, as Mr. Ward seems to invite. Whoever produced the CD-ROM from which the texts are taken, it seems unlikely that network availability was what they had in mind when they declared that the texts were in the public domain -- I rather suspect they were simply defending their own position, perhaps because they obtained the text from another commercial vendor too. As I indicated in the first place, we can't endorse the accuracy or legality of the texts -- they are based on a modern edition of some sort, rather than the original quarto and folio texts, which are to be the subject of SHAKSPER's own Public Domain project. In any event, it would seem that someone has already posted the files for FTP access via the Internet, as the note below explains. -- k.s.] From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Date: Wed, 25 Mar 92 20:32:55 PST Subject: FYI -- Shakespeare on-line FYI -- just saw this in the VNEWS. Best wishes. Richard Newsgroups: alt.prose Subject: Shakespeare via anonymous ftp Date: 25 Mar 92 04:54:01 GMT Sender:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (usenet news) Organization: U of Michigan, Research Systems Unix Group A few days ago, Grady Ward (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) posted an offer to send The Unabridged Shakespeare to anyone who could send him disks or $10. Well, I sent mine, and I've gotten the Works back already. Thanks, Grady. Just 'cause Shakespeare is such a keen guy, I've put everything that he did (that I have) up for anonymous ftp on terminator.cc.umich.edu [141.211.164.8] in ~ftp/shakespeare Except for the poetry, I've split the works into directories and files (there were just too many sonnets for me to go all the way). Everything seems to be pretty religiously tabbed, so it's probably going to be easy to do some nice formatting. Anyway, enjoy, wes
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 72. Thursday, 26 Mar 1992. Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1992 10:48:42 EST From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Hardy M. Cook) Subject: A Long Discussion of Tagging WordCruncher, TACT, and Micro OCP are all text-analysis software. WordCruncher and TACT both bill themselves as text-retrieval programs. Micro OCP "makes concordances, indexes, and word lists from texts in a variety of languages and alphabets." On the simplest level, all three locate words and word patterns in a text or corpus, but far more sophisticated analysis is possible. Micro OCP, according to the *User Manual*, "can be used for many text analysis applications including the investigation of style, vocabulary distribution, grammatical forms, rhyme schemes, text editing, and language acquisition and teaching." I am most familiar with WordCrucher, and more familiar with TACT than Micro OCP. However, I have not prepared texts to be used with these programs, relying instead on previously prepared texts: *The Riverside Shakespeare* with WordCruncher, *Hamlet In-TACT* (the three *Hamlet* texts that Ken Steele prepared and shared with participants in a SAA seminar on Shakespearean computing several years ago), and the Oxford Text Archive's collections offered to SHAKSPEReans last fall with Micro OCP. I don't mean this posting to be a tutorial in a subject about which I know very little myself, but some details are necessary to continue our discussion. Files prepared for WordCrucher seem to support "three levels of Reference Codes that indentify three levels of a standard outline." TACT, according to *User's Guide*, employs <angle brackets> to identify Text References as does Micro OCP: herein lies the issue of tagging our PD Shakespeare texts. With the Sonnets, I chose to post two versions: one with minimal tagging (basically only the <it> tag, which I am now inclined to replace with {braces}) and another fully tagged version with <angle brackets> that include T: Title, L: Line, P: Pagination, and S: Sonnet Number. The minimally tagged version could easily be reformated for TeX, while either can be used with a word processor. However, I suspect some of us who want to work with these e-texts will want to use them with one of the text-analysis programs. Selecting what to tag in the sonnets was relatively easy; selecting what to tag in the plays and deciding whether we would like to have untagged as well as tagged versions is another matter. Several months ago, Ken Steele proposed the following as possibilities for tagging the plays: Play Title eg. <T Hamlet Q1> Act/Scene eg. <A 3.2> Line [this should probably be added mechanically] Direction eg. <D Enter {Hamlet}.> Speech Prefix eg. <S {Ham.}> Font eg. {these words in italic} Language eg. <L Latin> ergo <L English> Some other things which might be added by an editor with sufficient resources and information are the following: Speaker (not always clear or the same as prefix) Verse/Prose (not always the same as the original ed.) Signatures/Pages/Formes Compositor Stints (usually a little theoretical) With the sonnets, I tried to reproduce in ASCII as closely as possible what I saw on the page. Thus, I added spaces where I saw large gaps and ran other elements together where I saw minimal spaces. Because I was trying to reproduce the "look" of the page, I included everything on the page, including signatures, pages, and forms. Thus, I would suggest that pagination information be included in our tagging. The Oxford Text Archives describes its encoding choices this way: ************************************************************************** This file contains embedded markers for use by Oxford Concordance Program, delimited by the characaters < and > The following categories of reference are included: T : Play title C : Compositor identifier P : Signature A : authorial attribution Y : (occasionally) type of copy S : Speaker prefix Z : Act/scene prefix stage direction etc D : embedded stage direction Lines begining with either a space or a star are text lines, one for each line in the original text. Lines begining within a * are justified lines. Hinman's lineation for the folio is followed. Lines begining with a reference (i.e. <) are not included in the lineation. The character # is used in some texts to distinguish homographs (e.g. Will and Will); it is also used with the hyphen to indicate cases where hyphenation is significant. The characters { and } (curly braces) are used to enclose material in italics Words containing tildes in the original texts have been expanded. Words hyphenated across a line boundary have be joined together and included at the end of the first line. A "%" marks the hyphen in this case. If the second part of the hyphenated word was the only thing on that line, an underscore "_" on that line is used to indicate that it is a non-blank line in the original text. Turnovers are joined together on the first line, and the character "|" is used to mark this point. ***************************************************************************** I am not sure if we would like to go into this detail, but here is what the OTA texts look like: Sample from OTA *King Lear* F1: <T KL><L 1><Y Q><P qq2><C B> 1 <Z {Actus Primus. Scoena Prima}.> 2 <D {Enter Kent, Gloucester, and Edmond}.> 3 <S {Kent}.> 4 *I thought the King had more affected the 5 Duke of {Albany}, then {Cornwall}. 6 *<S {Glou}.> It did alwayes seeme so to vs: But 7 *now in the diuision of the Kingdome, it ap-peares 8 *not which of the Dukes hee valewes 9 *most, for qualities are so weigh'd, that curiosity in nei-ther, 10 can make choise of eithers moity. 11 <S {Kent}.> Is not this your Son, my Lord? 12 *<S {Glou}.> His breeding Sir, hath bin at my charge. I haue 13 *so often blush'd to acknowledge him, that now I am 14 braz'd too't. 15 <S {Kent}.> I cannot conceiue you. 16 *<S {Glou}.> Sir, this yong Fellowes mother could; where-vpon 17 *she grew round womb'd, and had indeede (Sir) a 18 *Sonne for her Cradle, ere she had a husband for her bed. 19 Do you smell a fault? 20 *<S {Kent}.> I cannot wish the fault vndone, the issue of it, 21 being so proper. 22 *<S {Glou}.> But I haue a Sonne, Sir, by order of Law, some 23 *yeere elder then this; who, yet is no deerer in my ac-count, 24 *though this Knaue came somthing sawcily to the 25 *world before he was sent for: yet was his Mother fayre, 26 *there was good sport at his making, and the horson must 27 *be acknowledged. Doe you know this Noble Gentle-man, 28 {Edmond}? 29 <S {Edm}.> No, my Lord. 30 <S {Glou}.> My Lord of Kent: 31 Remember him heereafter, as my Honourable Friend. 32 <S {Edm}.> My seruices to your Lordship. 33 <S {Kent}.> I must loue you, and sue to know you better. 34 <S {Edm}.> Sir, I shall study deseruing. 35 *<S {Glou}.> He hath bin out nine yeares, and away he shall 36 againe. The King is comming. 37 *<D {Sennet. Enter King Lear, Cornwall, Albany, Gonerill, Re-gan}, 38 {Cordelia, and attendants}.> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I apologize for the length of this posting, but I felt it was important to get the issue of tagging the PD Shakespeare texts clearly in front of us. Your responses are sought. Hardy M. Cook Bowie State University