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:
for þ the number 3
for ð the number 6
for Ʒ the number 9
for æ the symbol >
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].
