The Dictionary of Old English and the final design of its computer system

Abstract

In June 1983, at a session chaired by Paul Bratley at the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities in Raleigh, North Carolina, I described what I thought was the final design of the computer system for the Dictionary of Old English. I have since discovered that the configuration for a computer system is seldom as final as one would wish. So I begin in truly medieval fashion with a retraction: the Dictionary of Old English did not purchase the Xerox STAR system about which I spoke at length in 1983. However, with a generous gift from the President of the University of Toronto, we were able to purchase a system which we think is superior, but which incorporates those features of STAR we found most attractive. The University hoped that our system might eventually also serve as a general humanities text processing and publication system. It is within this larger context I would like to begin. On the fourteenth floor of Robarts Library, where the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) has its offices, members of the Department of East Asian Studies presently hand-letter for their students exercises in Japanese; the Department of Religious Studies works with texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Coptic; the Zola Project produces editions in French; the Comparative Literature program trains students of Italian, German, and Spanish Literature; the Department of Middle Eastern Studies teaches Arabic; and the Dictionary of Old English makes use of those letters foreign to the Latin alphabet ce, ts, and b . What we all have in common is the need for text-editing and fast publishing, and some of us have the further need for a special alphabet or special character sets. Any computer system that will be useful to the humanities