---------------------- <> Guest Coordinator: Patrick Durusau [HUMANIST, IOUDAIOS, RELIGION, etc., 16 May 1994] [Religious Studies News 9.2 (May 1994)] [CSSR Bulletin 23.?] [codes: ... titles, ... emphasis, /

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... levels of headings.] ---------------------- [Patrick Durusau, the guest coordinator for this issue, is pursuing a Masters of Theological Studies degree at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His interests include the use of computers for the publication and analysis of religious texts, particularly those of the Ancient Near East. He may be contacted at: Patrick Durusau, P.O. Box 81126, Conyers, GA 30208 or pdurusau@crl.com.] When the Oxford English Dictionary completes its next edition in 2005, the following definition may appear for the term "computing humanist." "Computing humanist: Anachronism, original use was to designate humanists who used computers in teaching, research and analysis. Not unlike lexica, concordances and the codex form of written materials, computers are now an unremarked part of a scholars tools." Robert Kraft, through the Offline column and other efforts, has brought the seamless integration of computers into religious studies closer to reality. We thank him for introducing us to the potential and practice of humanities computing and for helping us to negotiate the passage to this new medium of research and communication. The Offline column seeks to continue that tradition, emphasizing the broad variety of tools that are now available for the scholar of religion. In order to serve the divergent audience of readers, which ranges from novice to Unix Wizard, articles will address computer topics at a full range of skill and experience levels. This issue includes: Net-News (new or important resources from the Internet), Hard-Copy (articles and reference material available in non-electronic format) and Soft-Bytes (software for scholars). Your suggestions, articles, notices, requests for specific topics and comments are always welcome. As always, Offline depends upon your support. Offline is made possible by the generous contributions of our readers who forward notices, announcements and other material for inclusion in this column. Due to space limitations, author's names accompany submitted articles only. Readers who forwarded other material for this issue of Offline include: Avi Hyman, Jeffrey Mirus, Sigrid Peterson and Dylan Tweney. Please forward comments and contributions to Beth Mackie at bmackie@unix.cc.emory.edu or at the address listed on page 2. Net-News

New List: TECHEVAL A new listserv, entitled TECHEVAL, provides an open forum for discussing the evaluation of computer related work in the humanities. The address is: TECHEVAL@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU. You may subscribe in the usual way. Send a message to LISTSERV@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU. You can leave the subject line blank. The message should read as follows: subscribe TECHEVAL your@email.address firstname lastname If you have any questions, send an e-msg to JSOSNOSKI@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU One of the purposes for instituting this list is to collect information and points of view on the evaluation of computer- related work in language and literary study for the Modern Language Association's Emerging Technologies Committee.

Project Muse: A New Venture In Electronic Scholarly Communication In one of the first joint ventures of its kind, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, and Homewood Academic Computing have joined forces to launch Project Muse, an initiative that enables networked electronic access to the Press's scholarly journals. This collaboration draws the Johns Hopkins University community together to move scholarly communication into the electronic age and develop an economic model that addresses rising costs and diminishing budgets. The first phase of the project, completed in February 1994, is a freely accessible prototype consisting of current issues of Configurations, MLN (Modern Language Notes), and ELH (English Literary History). The fully formatted text of these journals is now available on the Internet via on-line access to the library's server (http://muse.mse.jhu.edu). Features include subject, title, and author indexes; instant hypertext links to tables of contents, endnotes and illustrations; Boolean searches of text and tables of contents; and voice and textual annotations. Several members of the scholarly community at Johns Hopkins have already used this resource, and one professor describes it as "an intelligent, incredibly easy system to use... an actual research tool." The prototype is accessed through a networked hypermedia information retrieval system known as the World Wide Web (WWW). It can be viewed and searched using any of a number of freely available WWW readers, but runs optimally under the Mosaic reader developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. (There will be more details about Mosaic in a future column). Users of Mosaic can annotate text, record paths taken during on- line sessions, download text for printing, and create "hot lists" of frequently accessed documents. Mosaic readers are available for a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Mac, and Windows machines. Users of the prototype may send comments and suggestions with the on-line form provided in the prototype or via regular e-mail (ejournal@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu). The short-range goals of the prototype are the creation of an easy-to-use electronic-journal environment with searching and multimedia features that cannot be duplicated in print, and the collection of data on amounts and types of usage for an access and costing model. Long-range goals are to offer reasonably priced electronic journals to university libraries and to use on- line technology to make works of scholarship more widely available within individual university communities. If funding for capital costs can be raised, the project team aims to mount about forty of the Press's journals in math, the humanities, and the social sciences. These issues will appear on a prepublication basis and will be available electronically a few weeks in advance of the printed version. Beyond developing a prototype, Project Muse has enabled the university press, the library, and the computing center to engage in a meaningful dialogue about the current state of the scholarly communication process. This dialogue should not only influence the final appearance, price, and distribution method of the Press's on-line journals, but the shape of scholarly publishing in the information age. For additional information, contact Susanna Pathak, Project Muse Team, Johns Hopkins, spathak@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu.

Internet Access to SGML Textual Analysis Resources The University of Virginia Library is pleased to announce the Internet-accessibility of several of its text collections indexed with Open Text's PAT search engine. With the permission of Open Text Corporation and depositors of the texts included in this effort, they are now able to provide client/server access to several collections, including a growing body of Middle English texts, the King James and Revised Standard Versions of the Bible, and the Michigan Early Modern English Materials. Although no remote login to the University of Virginia system will be supported, access is possible through several client software packages, including Open Text's PatMotif and a freely available vt100 client developed by the University of Virginia. A full description of the client software and the textual resources offered is available via anonymous ftp from etext.virginia.edu (128.143.22.16), as /pub/announce (URL: file://etext.virginia.edu/pub/announce).

Kovacs' Directory Eight Edition As of March, 1994, the Eight Edition of Diane Kovacs' Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences has been released. Electronic conferences is used in its broadest sense and includes Internet interest groups, discussion lists, Usenet newsgroups, e- journals and e-newsletters that are of interest to scholars. This directory provides access information for each conference listed and is organized by subject areas. Since its original release, Kovacs' Directory has been available in both print format and free electronic copy. I find this dual distribution method, which provides maximum access for all readers, a useful model for the dissemination of scholarly information. The success of this model in providing scholarly information, should give pause to the advocates of access-as privilege proposals. Access information is available from the listserv@kentvm.bitnet or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu by sending the message get acadlist readme. By anonymous FTP to ksuvxa.kent.edu in the directory PUB/LIBRARY or gopher to gopher.cni.org (among others). For print editions, please contact Ann Okerson, ann@cni.org.

Ur 3 Project Texts There is now an ftp server at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania on which Sumerian texts in a standard ASCII transliteration format have been archived. This site is intended to be, amongst other things, the U.S. distribution point of the Leiden Ur 3 project. FTP to enlil.museum.upenn.edu in the directory E:\pub\Ur3. This directory contains Sumerian texts from the Ur III period. The texts were transliterated using characters from the ASCII alphabet only. The file CONVNTNS.TXT contains the list of conventions which were used in making the transliterations. As the text files will be updated at intervals, any suggestions for improving the transliterations are welcome. For questions or suggestions regarding the transliterations, please contact Remco de Maaijer and/or Bram Jagersma: JAGERSMA@RULUB.LEIDENUNIV.NL. For questions or suggestions regarding this FTP-site and related computer matters, contact Steve Tinney: STEVE.TINNEY@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU or sjt@enlil.museum.upenn.edu. Texts currently available include: texts from the Aleppo museum, P.J. Watson, Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City Museum, Vol. 1, Neo-Sumerian Texts from Drehen; L.W. King, Cuneiform texts from Babylonian tablets in the British Museum, Part XXXII (= CT 32), London 1912; and others. Hard-Copy

Infolingua Readers working with computers for the analysis of languages or texts, will be pleased to learn of the publication of this series of bibliographic reference works. These works were composed in part from contributions of scholars working in these areas or from solicitations sent over the Internet. I have not yet seen a hard copy of these works, but the volume Literary Computing contains over 500 references dealing with religious materials, with over 85% of those concerned with the Bible. These works should provide a useful reference for advanced researchers as well as those seeking a basic grounding in this area of growing importance. For further information, please contact Infolingua Inc., P.O. Box 187 Snowdon, Montreal Qc, H3X 3T3, Canada, or email: 73651.2144@compuserve.com.

Computational Morphology: Morphological Analysis and Generation, Lemmatization: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 492p.

Computational Parsing: Syntactic Analysis, Semantic Analysis, Semantic Interpretation, Parsing Algorithms, Parsing Strategies: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1029p.

Computational Lexicology And Lexicography: Dictionaries, Thesauri, Term Banks ; Analysis, Transfer and Generation Dictionaries ; Machine Readable Dictionaries ; Lexical Semantics ; Lexicon Grammars: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1031p.

Computational Text Understanding: Natural Language Programming, Argument Analysis: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 657p.

Computational Text Generation: Generation from Data or Linguistic Structure, Text Planning, Sentence Generation, Explanation Generation: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin with a survey article by Mark T. Maybury 1994, 649p.

Natural Language Interfaces: Interfaces to Databases, to Expert Systems, to Robots, to Operating Systems, and to Question- Answering Systems: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 847p.

Machine Translation: Aids to Translation, Speech Translation: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin and Laurent R. Bourbeau 1994, 2 volumes, 1168p.

Literary Computing: Style Analysis, Author Identification, Text Collation, Literary Criticism: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 581p.

Computer Assisted Language Teaching: Teaching Vocabulary, Grammar, Spelling, Writing, Composition, Listening, Speaking, Translation, Foreign Languages ; Text Composition Aids, Error Detection and Correction, Readability Analysis: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin and Elca Tarrab 1994, 2 volumes, 1066p.

Computer Mediated Communication: Computer Conferencing, Electronic Mail, Electronic Publishing, Computer Interviewing, Interactive Text Reading, Group Decision Support Systems, Idea Generation Support Systems, Human-Machine Communication, Multi- Media Communication, Hypertext, Hypermedia, Linguistic Games: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 862p.

Electronic Document Processing: Document Editing, Formatting, Typesetting, Coding, Storing, Interchanging, Managing: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 551p

Computational Character Processing: Character Coding, Input, Output, Synthesis, Ordering, Conversion ; Text Compression, Encryption, Display ; Hashing ; Literate Programming: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 580p.

Quantitative And Statistical Linguistics: Frequencies of Characters, Phonemes, Words, Grammatical Categories, Syntactic Structures ; Lexical Richness, Word Collocations, Entropy, Word Length, Sentence Length: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 508p.

Mathematical and Formal Linguistics: Grammar Formalisms, Grammar Testing, Logics, Quantifiers: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 612p.

Computational Speech Processing: Speech Analysis, Recognition, Understanding, Compression, Transmission, Coding, Synthesis ; Text to Speech Systems, Speech to Tactile Displays, Speaker Identification, Prosody Processing: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1187p.

Computational Linguistics in Information Science: Information Retrieval (Full-Text or Conceptual), Automatic Indexing, Text Abstraction, Content Analysis, Information Extraction, Query Languages: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 2 volumes, 1047p.

Optical Character Recognition and Document Segmentation: Character Preprocessing, Thinning, Isolation, Segmentation, Feature Extraction ; Cursive and Multi-Font Recognition, Writer/Scriptor Identification: Bibliography, by Conrad F. Sabourin 1994, 512p. Soft-Bytes

Free Document Imaging Package Scholars have used a variety of strategies to deal with the paper-intensive nature of the scholarly enterprise. From the note-cards that contain our library research to the conference papers that we would like to find for class discussion, scholars have devised a number of ad hoc ways to file and more importantly, find, needed information. One new strategy, made possible by personal computers, is the scanning and indexing of important information for later retrieval. In the jargon of the computer world, this scanning and indexing of material is known as the "Paperless Office." In its simplest form, this approach requires that the document be scanned and that image of the document be saved and assigned the key-words that will be used to index it for retrieval. It does require an investment of time for scanning and indexing as well as storage space for the images of the documents. If you are interested in exploring this approach to the storing and retrieval of documents, Omega has a special education offer that may be of interest. For a limited time, Omega is offering special educational packages of FilePlus, The Paperless Document Image Processing and File Management System, free to all students, teachers, and educational institutions (service fee of $30.00). Contact omega@canrem.com, or Omega, 1599 Hurontario St, Suite 301, Mississauga, Ontario, L5G 4S1, Attention: Dorothy Wasiak Tel :(905)891-3478 Fax :(905)891-7757 Information also available via modem at (905)681-3213. This software requires: an IBM PC Compatible 386sx or higher, 4MB of RAM, 10MB hard disk (minimum), DOS 3.3 or later, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher, Document scanner and Windows-compatible mouse.

TLG Workplace 3.0 and PHI Workplace 3.0 Users of the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and the PHI (Packard Humanities Institute) CD ROMs will be pleased to learn of the recent upgrade of one of the retrieval software packages for those collections. For those unfamiliar with these CDs, the TLG includes Greek texts from approximately 800 BCE until 600 CE, with some later texts and the PHI collection focuses on Latin literature until 200 CE. This software allows searching and printing of the texts found in these collections. A demonstration version of the TLG Workplace is available from oak.oakland.edu in the directory pub/msdos/cdrom/tlgwp301.zip. This demonstration version cannot print or copy text to the clipboard. It is otherwise fully functional. For further information on these programs, contact John Baima, Silver Mountain Software, 1029 Tanglewood, Cedar Hill, TX 755104-3019, john@ling.uta.edu.

DOS Internet Kit Dean Pentcheff (dean2@tbone.biol.scarolina.edu) has collected public domain programs that allow PCs with Ethernet or SLIP connections to access Internet services. The package includes programs for DOS as well as Windows systems. This collection is available by anonymous FTP at tbone.biol.scarolina.edu in the directory pub/kit. Remember to use binary transfer and get disk1.exe, disk2.exe and 00readme.doc.

Desktop Internet Reference If you have questions about what resources are available on the Internet or how obtain/use those resources, there are few starting places better than the Desktop Internet Reference. This software program has collected 1,800 pages of materials on topics ranging from on-line libraries to listservs and more. It is presently available for in DOS and Windows versions, with a Mac version in the planning. This program is available by anonymous FTP at ftp.uwp.eud in the directory pub/msdos/dir as ddir10.zip (DOS file) or wdir10.zip (Windows file). Use binary transfer when obtaining these files.

TACT-Textual Analysis Computing Tools 2.1 gamma The Centre for Computing in the Humanities has recently released a major revision of TACT, its Textual Analysis Computing Tools package. As described in the readme file that accompanies the release, "(TACT)... a system of 15 programs for MS-DOS, is designed to do text-retrieval and analysis on literary works. Typically, researchers use TACT to retrieve occurrences of a word, word pattern, or word combination. Output takes the form of a concordance, a list, or a table. Programs also can do simple kinds of analysis, such as sorted frequencies of letters, words or phrases, type-token statistics, or ranking of collocates to a word by their strength of association." This collection of programs offers an inexpensive yet powerful set of tools to allow scholars to explore computer aided analysis of textual materials. One recent example of the usefulness of TACT can be found in Mapping Echoes with TACT in the Old French Epic the Charroi de Ni^mes by Edward A. Heinemann, which appears in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 8, No. 4, at pages 191-202 (1993). Heinemann's analysis was carried out with an earlier version of TACT, but clearly illustrates the capabilities of these programs. TACT requires a standard MS-DOS platform with 640K RAM (preferably up to 16Mb additional memory); DOS 3.x or above; a large hard disk (the uncompressed installed programs occupy about 3.2Mb); and a -386 or faster processor. For those scholars who do not have a -386 or faster processor, TACT 1.2B is still available at the Gopher and FTP sites listed below. (Note, TACT 1.2 was the version used by Heinemann in the analysis noted above.)

Access to TACT 2.1 gamma: Gopher: TACT 2.1 gamma may be obtained by Gopher to gopher.epas.utoronto.ca in the following subdirectory: 5. Centre for Computing in the Humanities/ 4.Humanities Computing Resources / 6. Software /1. Textual Analysis Computing Tools /2. TACT 2.1 gamma. FTP: Use anonymous FTP to epas.utoronto.ca and move to the pub/cch/tact/tact2.1gamma directory. Type prompt to turn off the interactive prompts and then binary prior to transfer of the files. Then type mget *.* and all of the files will be sent to you. Remember to use zmodem or other error correcting transfer protoccols when downloading these files to your microcomputer. (TACT 1.2B is also available at pub/cch/tact/dist1.2B) By mail: TACT Distribution, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Robarts Library, Room 14297A, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5, CANADA. Atn.: Elke Rudman.

Stylometry Software Stylometry is an effort to assign quantitative values to the use of language by an individual. In cases of authorship, it is one tool to test the attribution of a text to one author rather than another. It does not give definitive answers to authorship questions, but does generate additional evidence to be considered by scholars concerned with questions of style and attribution of authorship. Robert A. J. Matthews and Thomas V. N. Merriam, in Neural Computation in Stylometry I: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 8, No. 4, at pp. 203-209 (1993) develop a new stylometric method based upon the use of a neural network computation technique known as back propagation. While the limitations of space prohibit more than the mention of this new technique, the authors have offered to make .EXE files containing fully trained multi-layer perceptions using Merriam and Horton discriminators available to anyone sending a blank IBM-compatible 3.5" disk and return postage. Address your request to: Robert Matthews, 50 Norreys Road, Cumnor, Oxford OX2 9PT, UK. Correction The OFFLINE 44 column mentions that Richard Wevers has a program for helping one learn vocabulary and verb forms and declension of Greek. Unfortunately the e-mail address is listed incorrectly. The correct listing is weve@ursa.calvin.edu. <-----> [Proposals for OFFLINE: Since Robert Kraft will no longer be coordinating OFFLINE, Religious Studies News is looking for someone to continue his work as Coordinator. Proposals addressing the overall direction and scope of the column as well as proposals for a single column as guest coordinator are welcome. We are looking for ways to include sections which are helpful for readers at various levels of computer expertise and sections which cover as many aspects of academic computing as feasible. Please send proposals to Beth Mackie, Editor RSN, PO Box 15399, Atlanta GA 30333.] A complete electronic file of OFFLINE columns is available upon request (for IBM/DOS, Mac, or IBYCUS), or from the ccat.sas gopher at gopher.upenn.edu (Penn gophers). To request printed information or materials from OFFLINE, please supply an appropriately sized, self-addressed envelope or an address label to Robert A. Kraft, Box 36 College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104-6303. Telephone (215) 898- 5827. Internet address: Kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (please note that the previous BITNET address is no longer operational). //end #45//