University of Virginia Library

The Seventh Program

Once the two decks (of cross-reference and headword cards and of concordance cards) are integrated into one, with the cards all in the desired order, one has the entire concordance in deck form. It is simple, then, to run the deck through the computer to get the final print-out. But it may also be necessary to remove from the IBM cards certain symbols which had

been substituted for other characters.[12] This can be done by means of a fairly simple program. For example, as I mentioned above, I coded into the deck during the key-punching of the text a symbol which preceded capital letters. The special program deleted the symbol, back-spaced the line into the space formerly used by the symbol, and printed the entire line in lower case letters except those letters formerly preceded by that symbol. Any symbol will do, of course, just so long as it is not one of the letters used in the text. (I used an equals sign.) This special program also deletes from the concordance cards the word being glossed, which is no longer needed since both the headword and the line of the text will 'speak for themselves' concerning what word is under consideration at this point in the glossary.

Further, since it is easiest to type the headword and cross-reference cards in all upper case letters (on the key-punch machine that is all one has), rather than insert a 'capitalization symbol' before each letter to be capitalized in the final print-out, this last program can be instructed to recognize all headword and cross-reference cards (because of the fact that they have no line numbers or text indications on them), and can be instructed to print them all in upper case. Hence, all my headword and cross-reference cards were printed in upper case, and all my text cards in lower case except those characters preceded by an equals sign. There is only one small exception to this: on the cross-reference cards I did not want the word 'see' to be in capital letters, so the program included a statement to the effect that on all cross-reference cards the word 'see' should be printed in lower case. (I did this, too, for the word 'or' on the headword cards. See the sample pages below.)

This last program is also the one which must be 'taught' how the page is to be printed. With special IBM charts, I mapped out what I considered to be an aesthetic and legible format, and Mr. Rompot programmed the material to match my design.[13] I suggest (following Mr. Benson's critique) that concordancers keep in mind that their efforts are likely to be used by eye-weary scholars, and thus the page should not scare away potential users of the concordance. If room allows, the text lines should be 'legibly' apart from one another, they should be indented from the headword and

cross-reference lines, and the text citations should be close enough to the text lines to be easily linked with the correct line (without the unsightly row of dots separating them). If one is going to take the trouble to make a concordance — and no small trouble it is! — he should at least make his volume legible and attractive.

The specific problems each concordancer faces concerning homographs, homonyms, variant spellings, compounds, hyphens and prefixes (especially negative prefixes for Middle English verbs), words to be deleted, alphabetization, abbreviations of all sorts (depending, of course, on the type of text being used, a published edition or a manuscript), apparent typographical or scribal errors in the 'copy text' chosen, proper nouns, punctuation, and so on — all these and other specific problems directly related to each text must be dealt with by each concordancer. One could not possibly state any general rules to follow for so varied a set of problems. All one can expect is that the policies adopted will be logical and consistently adhered to, that they will be stated clearly at the beginning of the concordance so that the user of the volume will know how to proceed, and that they will produce an easy to use, legible tool. My suggestions about how to arrange and use headwords and cross-references seem to me logical, and were practicable for the text with which I was working, but may not be so for every text. The usefulness of the final volume must be the guiding principle in every phase of the compilation of data, regardless of how much extra work the compiler subjects himself to. What good is a giant volume of data so hard to use and so confusing in its arrangement of material that it hardly pays to struggle with it?

The following are sample sheets from the Brut concordance. This preliminary copy was printed on the University of Iowa's computer which does not have the proper characters on its print chain; I have therefore substituted the following:

The final print-out will of course contain the Middle English letters, in both upper and lower case.

As I stated above, I have 1) listed Middle English words with close Modern English equivalents in spelling and meaning under the Modern English spelling [e.g. FOSTERED]; 2) listed Middle English words with Modern English equivalents in spelling only under their Middle English forms with a few definitions [e.g. FULLE]; and 3) listed Middle English words with no Modern English equivalents in their most common form with definitions [e.g. FULLUHT]. I have further cross-referenced some of the variant forms which can be found under headwords elsewhere in the concordance [e.g. FOT(E) (N), FULLEHT].