Symposium on the uses of the computer in literary research: A conference report

Abstract

This symposium held at Cambridge on 23-26 March 1970, was the first of its kind in the United Kingdom. Dr. Roy A. Wisbey and the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre at Cambridge University acted as hosts to the sixty-two participants from nine countries, who were fairly evenly divided between literary scholars with experience of computer applications and computer specialists with experience of literary work. Most of the questions considered in the papers given at the symposium come under the following headings: computers and lexicography: experiences with information retrieval and concordance production; problems of data input and output; programming languages; applications in non-European languages; vocabulary studies; stylistic analysis; poetry generation; and textual collation and editing. From the material produced, it was possible to see the current stages of progress achieved so far in all these areas of research. Some researchers were concentrating on the technical problems involved in using computers in literary studies, such as the input and output of data and programming languages suited to literary data processing. The graphical output of data on an sc4020, where the information is displayed on a cathode ray tube and recorded on microfilm or photo-recording paper, was described by Dr. R. F. Churchhouse and Miss S. M. Petty of the Atlas Computer Laboratory. The sc4020 can be used in a high speed plotter mode, with the normal character set available on a line printer, and concordances produced using the Laboratory's COCOA program have been recorded on microfilm using this mode. It is now possible to produce output in Greek characters, including diacritical marks, and work is in progress on reproducing Arabic characters as well. When all the character shapes are complete, the sc4020 will be used for the output of concordances in other non-Roman alphabets. Theoretically, it is possible to program the sc4020 to produce any alphabet or collection of symbols, and the availability of non-Roman alphabets should be a great encouragement to scholars requiring these facilities. A project to measure the extent to which it is possible to automate the routine checking and maintenance of the British Museum Catalogue was outlined by Miss Eveline Wilson of the Documentation Processing Centre, Manchester. Syntax analysis techniques using the syntax improving device (SID) developed at the Royal Radar Establishment have been used to analyze the data in the B.M. Catalogue. Entries in the catalogue have complex data structures, devised before machine processing was developed, and designed by men of high intelligence and on the assumption that