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I
It has long been recognized that concordances are essential tools in the critical, historical, and philological analysis of literary texts. Until very recently, it was also apparent that anyone who agreed to compile a concordance had assumed an appalling task. "An exhaustive concordance
That concordance-makers should turn to electro-mechanical and electronic aids was only to be expected. After World War II, there were efforts to compile indexes by the use of punched-card systems. But the limited capacity and sorting speeds of electro-mechanical equipment made the automatic production of very large concordances impractical. In the last few years, therefore, researchers have turned to large-scale electronic data-processing machines such as those marketed by Remington Rand and IBM.[5] The year 1957 witnessed three independent developments: Paul Tasman, with the collaboration of Rev. Roberto Busa, S. J., worked out a program for indexing the words in the Dead Sea Scrolls on the IBM 705;[6] John W. Ellison brought out Nelson's Complete Concordance to the Revised Standard Version Bible, automatically indexed by the Remington Rand Univac I; and Cornell University launched a program for a computer-produced series of concordances, with Stephen M. Parrish as General Editor.
In the same year, the University of California published the late Guy Montgomery's concordance to Dryden's poetry. Since this cumbersome oddity has given many of its users an erroneous impression of what a machine-prepared concordance looks like, it deserves some mention here. One must emphasize that it is not at all an electronically produced work and indeed only in small part an electro-mechanically produced one. When Professor Montgomery died in 1951, he left 240,000 manually indexed cards based on Noyes's edition of Dryden's complete poetical works. Out of the decision to use accounting machines to help in checking these cards grew the decision to print by offset from IBM sheets a list of index-words with abbreviated references to the places where they occurred, but without any context whatsoever. A sample entry from page 1 of the resulting concordance will indicate the difficulties that confront the user:
Professor Parrish's Concordance to the Poems of Matthew
Arnold (Ithaca, 1959) shows that a concordance compiled and
printed
by electronic data-processing machines (in this case the IBM 704) can give
as complete a verse-context and an array of identifying data as the manually
compiled type. The first three entries under ABIDE will indicate the
advantages of the Arnold:
- OTHERS ABIDE OUR QUESTION THOU ART FREE . . 2 SHAKESPEARE 1
- HE ESCAPES THENCE BUT WE ABIDE . . . . . . . . . 58 RESIGNATION 213
- THE LAW IS PLANTED TO ABIDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 SICK KING BOKH 208
Cornell concordances to follow the Arnold will incorporate refinements as rapidly as they are developed. Special print-wheels will provide a full array of punctuation marks and of characters such as the thorn and the ligatures (the Arnold has only the hyphen). Presently available techniques can instruct computers to discriminate between homographs and print them under separate headings, to cross-index hyphenated words, and, for earlier poets, to collect the old-spelling variants of a single word under their modern-spelling equivalent, as in Osgood's Spenser or Tatlock and Kennedy's Chaucer.
New possibilities in concordance-making and in other kinds of literary data-processing will doubtless emerge as computers rapidly become more and more complex, swift, and powerful. "The latest [computers]," writes Ritchie Calder, "are a thousand times faster than those of three years ago and a million times faster than those of ten years ago," and he reports that in June, 1959, in Paris, at an International Conference on Information Processing, scientists seriously discussed "machines which would memorize all the knowledge in the world."[8] One's mind reels and retreats to somewhat less staggering fantasies in which the C. W. Wallaces and Leslie Hotsons of the twenty-first century, working in American repositories, ask computers to search magnetic tapes of British archives for all occurrences of names with, say, the components Sh, k, sp, r or M, r, l. A daydream high fantastical, perhaps; yet the photoduplication during World War II of a vast number of British
But consideration of what can be done now is likely to be more fruitful than heady speculations about the future. Literary scholars should give earnest thought to making use of the machines available to them on their campuses: much can be done even with small-scale computers or punch-card and perforated-tape equipment.[10] Efforts should be coordinated in order to determine important needs in different specialties, to prevent duplication of work at different universities, and to disseminate information about new developments in the processing of literary texts. In this connection I am authorized to state that the Department of English at Cornell University will be glad to share its experience in preparing concordances by computer, and its knowledge of work being done at other centers, with those who may be ready to embark on projects of their own.
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