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II
The scholar is the key person in the development of specific programs to process literary data. It is he who must define goals for research and arrive at the most rational procedures for achieving these goals. His indispensable colleague, the computer-engineer, cannot move forward until the scholar himself knows what he wants to do. On the other hand, the scholar must have some awareness of how a literary text is prepared for computer-processing. I shall limit myself here to a simplified, non-technical outline of the steps required to record a text on magnetic tape.
- i. Having selected a base-text, the scholar edits it for punching.
- ii. Working at a machine with a conventional typewriter keyboard, an operator punches the text on cards. Each card contains a line of poetry or a similar amount of prose; the punched text is automatically recorded in print at the top of the card.
- iii. The cards are verified to insure accuracy of transcription. In
this process, a second operator punches the same text on the already
punched cards. A light flashes if there is any discrepancy between her
punch and that
20of the first operator; she then pulls the card in question, checks the print for errors, and punches the line correctly.
- iv. Identifying data (page of base-edition and line of poem) are automatically punched onto each card in the set; title cards separately punched for each poem are introduced into the set.
- v. The information on each card is transferred seriatim onto a magnetic master-tape and can then be processed on a computer according to a previously designed program. When the computer-run is finished, the master-tape can be stored indefinitely, or processed again as required. Through the use of other tapes, the recorded data can be altered so that a fresh master-tape is produced.
It will be apparent that the master-tape is in many ways more important than any single list of analyzed data which can be automatically printed from it. The tape is a compact, permanent record. It gives the editor of a computer-prepared concordance, for example, much greater flexibility than the editor of a manually prepared work can enjoy. If he decides at the last moment to include five "common" words that he had originally planned not to print, he need only instruct the computer to add those words to its processing list. And long after his concordance is published, he can quickly retrieve from the tape any verbal data excluded from the book: "the [IBM 704] computer can locate all occurrences of even a high-frequency word in about 20 minutes."[11]
So far as data-processing equipment is concerned, then, the tasks of Elizabethan scholarship in the coming years may be defined as the recording on master-tapes of the widest possible array of literary works in their most authoritative and most usable textual form; the duplication and depositing of such tapes in key centers of scholarship; the searching of the tapes on request to provide individual scholars with information that will increase the comprehensiveness and validity of their conclusions; and the selective publishing of machine-prints made from these tapes (concordances, lexicons, frequency lists, textual collations, etc.) so as to serve the needs of the profession as a whole. It will of course be necessary for appropriate groups of scholars to rationalize and allocate these labors.
For the rest of this paper, I should like to suggest the kinds of aid that philology, textual criticism, concordance-making, enumerative bibliography, and canonical studies can expect from data-processing machines. I am obviously taking on more than can be handled by any man, unless there exists somewhere a Hercules who is both a computerengineer
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