REACH, April 1990 ----------------- Research & Educational Applications of Computers in the Humanities ----------------------------------- Newsletter of the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California at Santa Barbara ------------------------------------------------ THREE COMPAQ 386/33 COMPUTERS ARRIVE IN HCF Recent months have seen significant improvements in the capability of the Humanities Computing Facility to meet the increasingly sophisticated equipment requirements of humanities computing. Early this year a Kurzweil 5100 scanner was acquired for the preparation of electronic text. Now, three new Compaq personal computers have been installed in the two locations of the Humanities Computing Facility to provide the appropriate type and level of equipment needed for the efficient creation, processing, and analysis of that electronic text. The three fast machines, all Compaq Deskpro 386s running at 33MHz, are equipped with very large 300MB hard disks capable of holding the long text files generated during the process of text development and analysis. Two of the Compaqs have been set up in the South Hall location of the HCF, and the third is in the Phelps Hall location. One of the two machines in South Hall 4421 is attached to the Kurzweil 5100 scanner, which was described in the last issue of REACH, and will function there as the host machine for the scanner. The other two machines will be devoted to text analysis functions. All three machines have been designated as special use machines, and their operation will be limited to text scanning and analysis activities. The two computers handling text analysis functions will be used to run the two primary PC-based concordance programs, the Oxford Micro OCP personal computer version of the Oxford mainframe concordance program, and WordCruncher, the concordance program first developed at Brigham Young University. The three new machines and their programs will significantly enhance the capability of the HCF to support UCSB humanities text analysis. Humanists interested in examining the possible uses of this important new equipment should communicate with Eric Dahlin, the coordinator of the HCF, at Ext. 2208. ------------------------------------------------------------ INTERNET LIBRARIES A new version of the list of the libraries accessible through electronic mail techniques, using the Telnet program and the Internet connection, is now available in the two locations of the Humanities Computing Facility. Among the libraries which can be reached through this process are those of the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. For further information on the various libraries accessible in this way, or for a demonstration of the method, please phone Eric Dahlin, the coordinator of the HCF, at Ext. 2208. ------------------------------------------------------------ ELECTRONIC MAIL INITIATIVE FOR HUMANITIES In conjunction with the Advisory Committee of the HCF, the Computer Center has just initiated a program to provide a selected number of faculty members in humanities departments with the free installation of an electronic mail connection and a free UNIX electronic mail account for the remainder of the current quarter and the entire next quarter. Connection will be by broadband or voice-over-data modem, whichever is more appropriate to the physical circumstances. Designed to provide UCSB humanists with the opportunity to test the possible uses and advantages of electronic mail under realistic conditions without making a commitment in equipment and funds, the program was initiated by Glenn Davis, Director of Information Systems and Computing, and Jamie Sonsini, UNIX Manager of the Computer Center. At the end of the experimental period, the faculty member will either assume the ongoing monthly costs of the connection and account or pass the opportunity to a new user. No retroactive connection charge will be applied in the event the faculty member decides to retain the account. There will always be some twelve to fifteen of the rolling experimental accounts in circulation at any one time. The Advisory Committee of the HCF has selected a group of participants for the first stage of the program from a list of nominations submitted by humanities departments, and the Computer Center will be setting up their connections and accounts in the next few weeks. ------------------------------------------------------------ OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE: A LIBRARY OF ELECTRONIC TEXT The Oxford Text Archive, a not-for-profit organization supported by the Oxford University Computing Service, was established in 1976 to collect and preserve machine-readable texts. Its Director is Lou Burnard. Designed to provide long-term storage and preservation of electronic versions of the texts which form the material of literary and linguistic scholarship, the Oxford Text Archive, acting on behalf of its depositors, provides information about its electronic texts to the scholarly community, and manages their distribution. The Archive contains electronic versions of literary works by many major authors, as well as works by less well-known modern writers. It also includes in its holdings a wide variety of reference works. Copies of many of the major standard electronic corpora are included in its collection, as are copies of most works produced by the OUCS Kurzweil Data Entry Service. Texts have also come to the Archive from individual scholars, major research projects and other institutions preparing electronic texts worldwide. At present, the Archive has a collection of nearly a thousand titles in twenty different languages. Many are generally available for academic use at modest charges. Others are available with the consent of the depositor, and a few are available only at Oxford. As far as possible, all texts are retained in standard plain ASCII format, suitable for use with almost any software. However, since they have come to the Archive from many different sources, it has not been possible to maintain a universal format or a minimum standard of coding. Some texts have been proofread to a high level of accuracy, while others may have arrived fresh from the scanner. Some texts may include special purpose codes for use with text analysis programs, while others are designed merely to mimic their printed source. Many of the coded texts use tagging schemes either directly or indirectly suitable for use with the Oxford Concordance Program or similar software. Documentation of the coding scheme, if any, used in each text is supplied with it whenever possible. The Archive is now exploring the possibility of converting its texts to a uniform standard. The copyright status of texts in the Archive varies considerably and is currently the subject of a detailed study. At present all users are required to sign a declaration agreeing to limit their use of the texts to private study and research and to refrain from redistributing them without consultation. A list of the texts in the Archive can be obtained by mail from the Archive at the addresses given below. It is also available through electronic networks, such as the well- known discussion group HUMANIST. The list of the Archive texts is a fascinating document in itself. Among the expected items are some exotics, the most unusual of which must be item U-423-D, the Chinese telegraphic character code set. Orders for texts must be accompanied by a completed copy of the printed order form, prepayment, and, in the case of texts of limited access, evidence of permission to copy granted by the original depositor of the text. Texts can be distributed either on magnetic tape, cartridge, or diskettes of various capacities. Inquiries to the Archive should be directed to the following addresses: Oxford Text Archive Oxford University Computing Service 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN, UK E-mail: Janet: archive@uk.ac.oxford.vax Bitnet: archive@vax.oxford.ac.uk Copies of the current list of Archive texts and the required printed order form are available for examination in the two locations of the Humanities Computing Facility. ------------------------------------------------------------ RESEARCH LIBRARY GROUP GETS GRANT The Research Libraries Group, RLG, has announced that it has just been awarded a grant of $30,000 by the Mellon Foundation to catalogue the holdings of the Oxford Text Archive in RLIN, the Research Libraries Information Network. The project will begin this month and take approximately a year to complete. The new records will be added to those already available in the RLIN listing of machine-readable files. This cataloging effort is a part of the joint initiative by Rutgers and Princeton, discussed in the last issue of _REACH_, to create an inventory of machine readable files in the humanities. Lou Burnard, the Director of the Oxford Text Archive, states that "the project bears testimony to the benefits of cooperation between British and North American institutions made possible by the Mellon award. When the task is done, researchers on either side of the Atlantic will have access to a reliable, integrated source of information about electronic texts, located moreover in the place where such information would naturally first be sought--the academic library." The new Oxford Text Archive Project continues the commitment of the Research Libraries Group to make information about computer files available through RLIN. The steadily increasing use of electronic text in humanities research emphasizes the importance of that commitment. ------------------------------------------------------------ NOTEBOOK II, A DATABASE PROGRAM FOR TEXT Notebook II is a database management system for the IBM-PC designed specifically for storing and retrieving text rather than numbers. It is particularly useful for keeping notes and maintaining records and bibliographies. It operates quite differently from the typical database management systems. You don't have to reserve space in advance by setting up a specific structure for your material. Notebook's fields and records expand automatically as you enter text. The process of entering text in your database is very similar to that used in a typical word processing program. Notebook's screen editor provides a number of the expected word processing functions such as word wrap, search and replace, and the copying and moving of blocks of text. Text can be entered directly in a Notebook database or prepared with an external word processing program. Material for the database can also be transferred from another database management program or downloaded from an on-line database. Once you've created the Notebook database, you can either browse through it or search for specific items. Records can be sorted on any field, and you can build versions of the database by searching for all records which meet specific conditions. A single database can be used to print bibliographies in a variety of formats. Printing can either be done in a standard format, or the report editor can be used to design special formats. The report can be sent directly to the printer or to a disk file which can be incorporated in another document. Two optional accessory programs are available. The first, Bibliography, compares citations in your manuscript with entries in a Notebook II database and automatically constructs a bibliography of all works cited. The second, Convert, makes it easier for you to import records from an on-line database into a Notebook II database. The Notebook II program is available from Pro/Tem Software, Inc., 814 Tolman Drive, Stanford, CA 94305, 415/947-1024. A copy of the program has been installed on a machine in each of the two locations of the Humanities Computing Facility for the purpose of demonstration and testing. If you're interested, stop in at one of the locations and give it a try. ------------------------------------------------------------ HCF Locations: South Hall 4421 Phone: 805/961-2208 Phelps Hall 5215 Phone: 805/961-8036 ------------------------------------------------------------ CATALOGUE OF IBM INSTRUCTIONAL SOFTWARE The IBM Corporation recently issued a publication, _Tools for Learning_, a catalogue of academic software developed over the last several years through IBM sponsorship of initiatives at various educational institutions. Programs developed in the humanities include applications in history, languages, writing, music, and philosophy. A copy of the publication is available for examination in the South Hall location of the Humanities Computing Facility. Two additional sources of information on instructional applications of computers are Wisc-Ware and ISAAC. Wisc-Ware is a distribution network for instructional software sponsored jointly by the IBM Corporation and the University of Wisconsin. ISAAC, the Information System for Advanced Academic Computing, is a system of databases combined with an electronic discussion group which enables users around the world to share information on academic computing. ISAAC is sponsored jointly by IBM and the University of Washington. The Humanities Computing Facility will be acquiring additional information on these resources during the coming period. ------------------------------------------------------------ UC COMPUTING HUMANISTS GATHER AT UCLA Members of the University of California community involved in the use of computers in the various disciplines of the humanities met at the UCLA campus on Friday, April 6. Convened by Mark Rose, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Vicky Walsh, Director of the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility, the one- day meeting illustrated the increasingly important part which computers are playing in humanities scholarship. It also demonstrated the importance of greater cooperative activity among all segments of the University of California humanities community. Sponsored jointly by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, based at the Irvine campus of the University, and the Humanities Computing Facility at UCLA, the first ever gathering of its kind was attended by faculty, administrative, and staff representatives from the Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz campuses of the University. After a morning discussion in which campus representatives outlined the current state of humanities computing on their home campuses, the afternoon session was devoted to a discussion of future plans and goals. A three-person working committee was formed to draft a preliminary plan of organization and action. Members are Robert Given, UCI History Department; Allan Grapard, UCSB Religious Studies Department; and George Guffey, UCLA English Department, who will serve as chair. ------------------------------------------------------------ ADVENTURES IN THE LAND OF THE SCANNER I'm gradually coming to grips with the essential spirit, or whatever it is, of the Kurzweil 5100 scanner, after these last several weeks of intense communication with the electronic marvel. It's obviously a very sensitive and intelligent device. Some persons have incautiously said that computers are simply dumb machines. I doubt it. Personally, I've always been a firm believer in the intelligence of computers. The only trouble is that the intelligence often seems a malevolent one. Clearly the scanner has some likes and dislikes. But, I'm not always sure what they are, and it's going to take some more time to unravel them. On one or two occasions in the middle of scanning some more difficult text, it's even given me one of those inscrutable fatal error messages and tossed me unceremoniously out into DOS. But, being a hardened user of desktop publishing programs, some of whose early versions were noted for ferociously temperamental behavior, I can usually manage to treat these events with a certain worldly nonchalance. Still, it is obviously not a machine for the faint of heart. What about the current scanning projects? One faculty member is scanning portions of a book preliminary to the preparation of a new edition. Another is scanning a work of fiction in order to be able to test some hypotheses he has developed. He'll be analyzing the resulting electronic text with one of the concordance programs running on the new Compaq 386. A third faculty member has been scanning in some of his essays prepared on a typewriter long before the days of the personal computer. The scanner has also been called into play to assist in the repair of the damage created by one of those hideous disasters, the accidental formatting of a hard disk. Fortunately, a recent printed version of the unrecoverable files was available, and the scanning of it, although time consuming, took a lot less effort than keying the whole thing in again by hand. As a sometime amateur calligrapher, I'm going to enjoy testing the scanner's ability to read handwriting. My normal hand is an italic with few ligatures, and it shouldn't have too much trouble with that after a bit of training. Then I can give it more of a challenge, such as a facsimile of an old manuscript done in black letter. One interesting aspect of the training feature is the ability to instruct the scanner to record any unusual character as a particular extended ASCII character or keyboard symbol. This gives the scanner a way of dealing effectively with characters outside the normal run of the keyboard, and raises the 5100 above more basic models. --Eric Dahlin ------------------------------------------------------------ REACH is published monthly by the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Advisory Committee: William Ashby French & Italian Alva Bennett Classics Edward Branigan Film Studies John DuBois Linguistics Gunther Gottschalk, Chair Germanic, Oriental & Slavic Allan Grapard Religious Studies Barbara Harthorn Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Gerald Horne Black Studies Albert Lindemann History Ursula Mahlendorf Women's Studies Michael O'Connell English Giorgio Perissinotto, Vice Chair Spanish & Portuguese Nathan Salmon Philosophy Guadalupe San Miguel Chicano Studies Burr Wallen Art History ------------------------------------------------------------ HCF Coordinator & Editor of REACH: Eric Dahlin Phone: 805/961-2208. E-mail: hcf1dahl@ucsbuxa.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ REACH is produced on a Compaq 386, using Microsoft Word, Version 5.0, and Xerox Ventura Publisher, Version 2.0, with camera ready copy printed on an HP LaserJet II. Printing is by UCSB Printing & Reprographic Services. ------------------------------------------------------------