REACH, May 1990 --------------- Research & Educational Applications of Computers in the Humanities ----------------------------------- Newsletter of the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California at Santa Barbara ------------------------------------------------ A NEW DODGE IN FRENCH TEXT ANALYSIS ARTFL stands for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language, an immense collection of computerized written French. It's the culmination of a project started in 1957 when the French government began the lengthy task of creating a new dictionary of the French language. To give the developers of the dictionary ready access to a large body of word samples, an extensive selection of French texts was transcribed for use with a computer. Now, over thirty years after the start of the original project, a corpus of 150 million words has been assembled, representing a broad range of written French from literature to the sciences and technical writing from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The value of this corpus for many humanists engaged in French studies quickly became apparent, and ARTFL was soon developed as a cooperative project of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago to preserve it permanently for such uses. Users access the database through the PhiloLogic system, a text retrieval program. Results can be displayed on screen, printed or stored on disk at ARTFL, downloaded to a microcomputer, or sent by electronic mail. Access to ARTFL is available from anywhere in the United States and Canada with the use of any standard microcomputer and a modem, or through several computer networks. Access to the ARTFL database is through a consortium of user institutions, each of which pays an annual subscription fee. Questions from prospective users should be directed to: Mark Olsen, ARTFL Project Dept. of Romance Lang. & Lit. University of Chicago 1050 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 312/702-8488 E-mail: mark@gide.uchicago.edu ------------------------------------------------------------ LAPTOP ON LOAN The Zenith Corporation has provided the HCF for six months with a Zenith 286 laptop computer for short-term loan to UCSB faculty humanists. The machine is equipped with a 40MB hard drive and one 1.4MB, 3.5 inch floppy drive. It will run on either AC power or a rechargeable battery with a four hour life-span. The Advisory Committee is now establishing policies for the use of the laptop. Anyone interested in placing a request for its loan should communicate with Eric Dahlin, the Coordinator of the HCF, at Ext. 2208. ------------------------------------------------------------ IBM MULTI-MEDIA INSTRUCTIONAL EXHIBITION Computers are now appearing more and more frequently in the classroom setting, presenting intriguing opportunities for innovative instructional techniques. The theoretical possibilities of combining high quality sound, text, motion video, still frames, graphics, and music are fascinating, but the steps to a practical implementation can be confusing in their technological multiplicity and complexity. To provide UCSB humanists with information on new computer classroom uses, IBM and the UCSB College of Letters and Science are sponsoring an exhibition of multi-media computerized instructional applications. It will take place on Thursday, May 24, from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm in the UCSB University Center Pavilion Room. Guest speakers at the exhibition will include Fred Hofstetter, Associate Provost for Academic Computing and Instructional Technology of the University of Delaware, an IBM Consulting Scholar; Mark Hale, Jr., Director of the Center for Instructional and Research Computing Activities of the University of Florida, an IBM Consulting Scholar; and Paul LaRose, Chairman of the Guitar Department of the University of Southern California School of Music. Discussions and demonstrations will include the use of a variety of multi-media techniques in classroom and laboratory, as well as multi-media authoring systems, sources of information on existing applications, and application development tools. Those wishing to attend the exhibition of multi-media applications may register in advance for the event by telephoning 805/569-3457. ------------------------------------------------------------ PRESERVATION OF THE MEDIEVAL SPANISH ARCHIVE Throughout its history, Spain has lost many great libraries, and now the remaining rare and fragile manuscripts and early printed texts are increasingly in danger of disintegration. How can they be both preserved and yet remain available for examination? To solve this problem, an international group of scholars is proposing the creation of a digital archive of Spanish manuscripts and texts. Participating in the development of the proposal are Charles Faulhaber, University of California, Berkeley; Joseph Nitti, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Angel Gomez Moreno, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Francisco Marcos Marin, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid; and Mercedes Dexeus and Xavier Ajenjo, Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid. The project is designed to provide access to the entire corpus of medieval Spanish literature. Scholars as well as general readers will be able to carry out their studies without danger to the physical works. Contingent upon funding, the project will develop a collection of digitized images of manuscripts and incunabula, transcriptions of a large number of the texts themselves, text retrieval software, and a catalogue to serve as an interface to the texts. The authors of the proposal expect that the results of the project will be made available to users all over the world in the form of a CD-ROM. A similar project in Portuguese material, the Bibliography of Old Portuguese Texts, is also now underway, involving the collaboration of two University of California faculty members, Harvey Sharrer of the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Arthur Askins, of the University of California, Berkeley. Those interested in learning more about the Spanish Archive project should communicate with: Charles Faulhaber Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 E-mail: cbf@faulhaber.berkeley.edu ------------------------------------------------------------ ASIS NEWSLETTER The HCF has received a copy of _SIG/AH_, the newsletter of the Special Interest Group on the Arts and the Humanities of the American Society for Information Science. The publication contains much information of interest to computing humanists on various projects, resources, references, and events. A sample copy of the newsletter is available for examination in the South Hall location of the Facility, and the HCF is now acquiring additional material about the group's activities. For further information on the publication, please communicate with the _SIG/AH_ Editor: Matthew Gilmore 2142 F St., NW #320 Washington, DC 20037 E-mail: gy945c@gwuvm.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ ART HISTORY STUDIES IN DIGITAL IMAGING A recent announcement in _SIG/AH_, the newsletter of the Special Interest Group on Arts and Humanities of the American Society for Information Science, contained an item of interest to art historians. The announcement indicated that the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities in Bergen, Norway is undertaking studies of methods and technologies for digital image processing and analysis in art history. Centre representatives will be visiting research groups and individuals active in this particular field. Information about any on-going activities is welcomed by the Centre, and should be directed to: Knut Hofland The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities Harald Haarfagres gt. 31 P.O. Box 53 University N-5027 Bergen, Norway E-mail: fafkh@nobergen.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ MAC CONFERENCE WITH GUY KAWASAKI University of California Extension at Santa Barbara has announced its organization and sponsorship of the First Annual Macintosh Summit Conference. The three-day event, coordinated by Guy Kawasaki, will be held on the campus of UCSB from August 22 through August 24. Kawasaki is well-known to the Macintosh community as the former president of ACIUS, Inc., the publisher of 4th Dimension, and, previously, as the director of software product management at Apple Computer, Inc. The conference is designed for advanced Macintosh users who want to increase their familiarity with such areas as desktop publishing, interactive media, slidemaking, design and modeling, object-oriented graphics, and Macintosh hardware configuration. Lectures, demonstrations, and hands- on lab sessions are included. The enrollment deadline for the conference is August 10. The fee is $680.30, which includes lunches and a first-evening beach barbecue. For any further information, or for a copy of the complete detailed event brochure, please phone Vince Cole, Program Assistant of UCSB Extension at 805/961-4143. ------------------------------------------------------------ SEARCHER AT UCSB: PROGRAM TO EXPLORE THE TLG Computerize all known classical Greek literature, and you have the TLG, the _Thesaurus Linguae Graecae_, an electronic collection of Greek literature from Homer in the eighth century BC to the closing of the Academy in the sixth century AD. Developed by Theodore Brunner of the University of California, Irvine, the collection covers some 3000 authors, with more than 8000 individual works, and about 61 million words of Greek text. Initially distributed on magnetic tape, the TLG is now also available in the form of a CD-ROM, currently #C, the third in the series. Related materials are handled by PHI, the Packard Humanities Institute, and CCAT, the Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts, at the University of Pennsylvania. Since the TLG texts are encoded in a particular ASCII format, called "Beta Code," the use of the material requires special software. Three years ago, Robert Renehan, a faculty member in the Classics Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Randall Smith, a Research Assistant and graduate student in the same department, decided to develop such software for the PC. Funding for the project was provided by the Academic Senate, the Office of Instructional Development, and the College of Letters and Science at UCSB. The result is Searcher, a TLG search program on MS-DOS which can be used on a PC to gain access to the Greek texts on the TLG CD-ROM #C, as well as the Latin texts of the CCAT/PHI CD-ROM #1. It provides search, browse, and offload capabilities for these two CDs, as well as searching capability for the PHI CD-ROM #2. Randall Smith and Darl Dumont, another graduate student in the UCSB Classics Department, were the principal authors of Searcher. However, as Randall Smith says, "Searcher is really the result of work by many people. The original version of a TLG searching program was a UNIX program written by Gregory Crane of Harvard University, and Searcher owes much to his effort. The Browser portion of Searcher was written by Tony Smith of the University of Manchester. Parts of Searcher came from the Beta Code Management Toolkit, written by Alan Humm of CCAT at the University of Pennsylvania, and printer fonts came from the Duke Language Toolkit." Searcher is not a shareware program, a public domain program, or a commercial venture. It's a product of research at UCSB and is copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California. However, the UCSB Classics Department does make it available for a modest fee to assist researchers and scholars in their activities, and has included source code so that users can make changes to the program. For more information on Searcher, its capabilities and hardware requirements, please communicate with: Randall Smith Dept. of Classics University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Phone: 805/961-3556 Fax: 805/961-8016 E-mail: 6500rms@ucsbuxa.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ UCSB LIBRARY NEWS: PEGASUS IN THE WINGS The new UCSB computer catalogue system, to be known to all as Pegasus, is now in the final stages of development, and is due to become active in the fall term. It's a NOTIS system similar to the one currently in use at the University of Delaware. A new resource, the Current Contents database of journal article titles has now become available to campus users through MELVYL. It's open only to University of California users, and a password is required for access from any point outside the Library. On another front, the Library staff is now at hard at work on a process of interest to many users, the ability to create a tagged version of a file containing the results of a search session on MELVYL, and then to download that file to a personal computer for use with a bibliographic program such as ProCite. A functioning version is being promised by fall. For further information on these items, please phone Carol Gibbens in the Reference Department of the UCSB Library at Ext. 8051. ------------------------------------------------------------ A LOGICAL GATHERING AT UC RIVERSIDE Some sixty representatives of philosophy departments of various institutions in California, as well as the University of Arizona and Cornell, attended a recent meeting at the University of California, Riverside to discuss developments in computer-aided instruction in logic. Held on Tuesday, May 1, the meeting was convened by Carl Cranor of the UCR Philosophy Department, Director of the UCR Logic Laboratory. Discussion centered on the results of the cooperative study project developed between IBM Corporation and the philosophy departments at the University of California, Riverside; California State University, San Bernadino; California State University, Fullerton; and San Bernadino Valley College. As part of the project, IBM provided equipment to these institutions to establish computerized networks for the teaching of philosophy courses, using in particular the computer-aided software developed at UCLA by David Kaplan and Robert Martin. The software, "Logic: A Workbook," is based on the text _Logic_, by Kalish, Montague, and Mar. Additional details of this cooperative project in computerized philosophy instruction will be reported in future issues of _REACH_. ------------------------------------------------------------ SECRETS OF _REACH_ REVEALED _REACH_ is produced with desktop publishing techniques, and readers might be interested in the methods used to take each issue from original text to camera-ready copy. I normally create my text with Microsoft Word 5.0 on whatever PC is handy at the time, usually a private Everex 286. At times, I've used Microsoft Word 4.0 on a Mac Plus with an attached DaynaFile for file transfer between PC and Mac. Manufactured by Dayna Communications, Inc., the DaynaFile is an external Mac drive capable of reading and writing files to MS-DOS formatted disks. I keep the Word files as simple as possible, since I'm going to load the final files into Ventura Publisher, Version 2.0, a powerful desktop publishing program which does its own, more sophisticated formatting. As I write, I use double hyphens for dashes and the usual "inch mark" for double quotes. Ventura converts these automatically to the extended ASCII characters used in Ventura's fonts for the true em dashes and the true open and closed quote marks used in professional typesetting. Next, I use Ventura Publisher to develop the final layout of the newsletter. For this step, I always use the Everex 286 because it is equipped with a high-resolution black and white Amdek 1280 monitor. This monitor, identical to the Wyse 700, is a key element in the page layout stage. With it, I can see much more readable text at one time than I can with standard monitors. I do some of the final editing of the text in Ventura and some in Word. Ventura has a built-in text editing mode, but it doesn't have as many capabilities as a fully-fledged word processor, and I sometimes find it simpler to go back to Word. Even after Word files have been loaded into Ventura and tagged with formatting specifications, they can still be edited with Word. Ventura inserts tag names and formatting codes into the Word file, but leaves the text itself untouched. At the conclusion of the layout process, I print out the final camera-ready copy from Ventura on an HP LaserJet Series II, using Hammermill Laser Plus paper for its crisper images and wax holdout. I'm expecting to switch to an HP LaserJet III, with its improved resolution, in the near future. The typeface is one from the Bitstream Fontware collection called Zapf Calligraphic, the Bitstream version of the Palatino typeface registered to the Linotype Company. Final offset printing is done by UCSB Printing and Reprographic Services on campus. --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 an Everex 286, 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. ------------------------------------------------------------