 | |  |
Notes
The present essay is a revised version of a paper written for the Report of M.L.A. Conference 20 (Opportunities for Research in Renaissance Drama) and delivered before the Conference on Dec. 28, 1960. I am indebted to my colleague Professor Stephen M. Parrish, who introduced me to the mysteries of computers and who has answered my queries with invariable kindness and lucidity.
See the classified bibliography in B. Quemada, "La Mécanisation dans les Recherches Lexicologiques," in the Univ. of Besancon Cahiers de Lexicologie, I (1959), 41-46. See also Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information, 2 vols. (1959); Martha Boaz, ed., Modern Trends in Documentation (1959); M. E. Maron, "Handling of Non-Numerical Information," Chap. 11 in Vol. 2 of Handbook of Automation, Computation, and Control, ed. Eugene M. Grabbe et al. (1959); and for a non-technical discussion of information-retrieval systems, Francis Bello, "How to Cope with Information," Fortune, LII (Sept., 1960), 162-167, 180-192.
In "Literary Data Processing," IBM Journal of Research and Development, I (1957), 256, Paul Tasman gives comparative figures for compiling a lexicon file index and concordance to the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas (a work of about 2,000 pages and almost 1,600,000 words) : manual method—3 persons, 20,000 hours; punched-card method—3 persons, 1,000 hours; large-scale data-processing method—1 person, 60 hours, "exclusive of the presentation and programming time." ("Programming" means devising a sequence of operations so that a computer can perform a particular job of data-processing.) For discussions of techiques involving smallscale equipment, see n. 10, below.
See Tasman (n. 5, above), and Busa, "The Index of all Non-Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Published up to December, 1957," Revue de Qumran, I (1958), 187-198.
For a breakdown of the time, which is, again, exclusive of editorial work and of programming, see the preface to the Arnold, pp. vii-viii; for an account of the programming, see James A. Painter, "Computer Preparation of a Poetry Concordance," Communications of the A[ssociation for] C[omputing] M[achinery], III (1960), 91-95.
See British Manuscripts Project (1955); this insufficiently known checklist of the microfilms, compiled by Lester K. Born, is sold by the Photoduplication Service of the Library of Congress.
See the extended discussion by Quemada, "La Mécanisation," pp. 9-33. Cf. also the useful mimeographed Reports of the Groth Institute, founded by Professor Ray Pepinsky at the Pennsylvania State University. With the aim of preparing a revised edition of Paul von Groth's encyclopedia of crystallography "in perhaps a hundred volumes," Professor Pepinsky and his co-workers have developed effective techniques of indexing and informationretrieval using inexpensive electro-mechanical equipment: see esp. Reports Nos. 40, 41, 44-48, 53.
John W. Ellison, for example, is planning to collate electronically 800 versions of the Greek text of the Bible.
Tasman, p. 256, mentions reconstructions of lacunae in the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Up to five consecutive words," he reports, "have been 're-written' by the data processing machine in experimental tests where the words were intentionally left out of the text and blank spots indicated."
See Hoy's "The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon," SB, VIII (1956), 129-146, IX (1957), 143-162, XI (1958), 85-106, XII (1959), 91-116, and XIII (1960), 77-108.
Neither word is indexed in Mrs. Cowden Clarke's concordance; except for a few inadvertent omissions, all occurrences in Hamlet only are listed in the Appendix to Crawford's Kyd concordance.
Here as elsewhere, procedure will have to be flexible. It would probably be advisable to include all the plays in the "Beaumont and Fletcher" canon in one concordance. Again, if a successor to Bartlett believes that hands other than Shakespeare's are present in Henry VIII and Pericles, he should nevertheless include these two plays in his concordance and content himself with stating his views in the preface.
See "Chemical Literature Gets a Quicker Index," Chemical and Engineering News, XXXVIII (April 4, 1960), 27-28.
See Luhn's "Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval Systems," in Boaz, Trends in Documentation, pp. 45-58.
"Bibliographical Links Between the Three Pages and the Good Quartos," in A. W. Pollard et al., Shakespeare's Hand in "Sir Thomas More" (1923), pp. 113-141.
The kinds of evidence bearing on attribution are more various than can be discussed here. By counting distances between punctuation marks, a computer can gather statistics about sentence-length and sentence-segmentation. By collecting all words with certain medial or terminal letters, it can help one to establish authorial or compositorial spellings. By retrieving blank-verse lines with two- or three-letter final words, it can provide information about weak endings. The scholar armed with knowledge of a computer's capabilities will readily think of ways of exploiting them.
Since I wrote these remarks, I have learned that Professors Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, using computers, have applied statistical methods to the determination of the authorship of the disputed Federalist papers. A report on their work will appear shortly in a book on the Harvard Computer Symposium.
| | |