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
to the Bible, such as that of James Strong," John W. Ellison estimates,
"takes about a quarter of a century of careful, tedious work to guarantee
accuracy."
[4] When in February,
1911, Professor Lane Cooper of Cornell University, with the aid of
sixty-seven workers, saw the Wordsworth concordance through the press
only two years and three months after excerpting of the Hutchinson edition
had begun, his achievement was quite properly regarded as remarkable.
After tens of thousands of man-hours had been spent in excerpting,
alphabetizing, and checking, a concordance-editor was usually compelled
to search far and wide for a publisher (the Wordsworth was delayed about
nine months until a suitable one could be found) and, often, a handsome
subvention. As printing costs soared, large concordances became more and
more rare. The only conventionally-produced large concordance to an
English or American poet which has appeared since the end of 1941 seems
to be
Professor Eby's concordance to Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
and
selected prose. This work of 980 pages lists at $25.
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:
ABIDE HAP 1928
For each such entry under ABIDE, the reader must consult the prefatory list
of full titles geared to the cryptic symbols. He will then learn that HAP
stands for "The Hind and the Panther" and that the poem begins on page
218 of Noyes. He must next turn to that page and move forward until he
locates line 1928, "No Martin there in winter shall abide," in column B of
page 243. But his work is just beginning. In order to ascertain Dryden's
various uses of ABIDE (eighteen instances), he must either write out each
line as he locates it or else jot down all the page and line numbers of Noyes
in which ABIDE occurs and riffle the pages back and forth as he tries to
compare instances. One doesn't like to think of the agonies of a reader who
wishes to locate and analyze occurrences of the fifty-seven words in
"Dryden's major vocabulary" which, according to the preface, occur "from
400 to 1,100 times apiece."
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
Here the concordance provides a full line of context for each instance of the
index-word and prints the instances in the order of their occurrence
in Tinker and Lowry's edition of Arnold's
Poetical Works.
The
identifying information to the right gives the page of Tinker and Lowry on
which the line appears, then the title of the poem in which it occurs, or a
rather full and readily understood abbreviation, and lastly the line number.
In most cases, the reader will probably be able to determine the different
uses of the index-word from the entries themselves, but if he should wish
to consult an even fuller context, he can immediately turn to the indicated
page of Tinker and Lowry. An appendix gives a helpful index of words in
order of their frequency in Arnold's text. The production of this volume of
965 pages required some two hundred hours of card-punching,
tape-recording, data-processing, and listing.
[7] The IBM sheets were then
reproduced by
offset and bound in an attractive volume which is priced at $10.
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
documents, now available at the Library of Congress on microfilm,
provides a notable precedent for the internationalization of archives.
[9]
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.
