Introduction to Humanities Computing Spring 1999 Lecture Six

Passport to Tour What is the important Concept from Computer Confluence Chapter 6 Devoted to spread sheets Which is transferable to The world of text analysis ? Malleable Matrix

A tour Dartmouth Dante Database Project DDP is still best accessed via Telnet. The address remains: library.Dartmouth.EDU at the prompt type connect dante

What is an electronic text? Can you provide examples? What type of electronic text will survive?

What is a electronic text? s Any string of characters s Any file or document that can be read s A word processing file s A text file

Types of Electronic Texts s Literary text s Linguistic corpus s Hypermedia work

A variety of forms s WWW site (Hypermedia) s Myst, Macbeth (Software, Text, and Media) s MS Word formatted file (Wordprocessing) s ASCII Text file (aka “Flat File”)

ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange 0 Null 3 EOT (end of text) 13 CR (carriage return) 32 SP (space) A 97 a, 98 b, 99 c...

Coding Standards s ASCII = 7 bits per character 128 characters - 7 bits per character 32 Reserved for printing info Rest for printing characters s Extended ASCII = 8 bits or 1 byte, 256 characters, upper ASCII characters used for special characters, characters with diacritical marks & ligatures s UNICODE = 16 bit character set 65,000 characters - most known languages

Why? s Cross-Platform s Long-term survival of data s You can use it to encode more complex documents using markup (SGML) ASCII Text + Markup = Electronic Representation of Literary Text

Encoding Welcome Welcome to 3F03 This is the home page for 3F03 Quantitative Methods in the Humanities Français In HTML all formatting provided by codes using ASCII characters

Content Model Text Head Body Title Heading Paragraph

Limits of HTML s No codes for many of the features: Character, Author, Text type, Sonnet, Lines s Text analysis software can’t handle it s Languages other than English

COCOA Markup s Continuous Tags Do note require closing - change value s Format: (angled brackets are delimiters) s Example >

COCOA example > THE MISUNDERSTANDING A PLAY IN THREE ACTS To my friends of the THEATRE DE L'EQUIPE CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY: THE OLD MANSERVANT... MARIA LE MALENTENDU (THE MISUNDERSTANDING) was presented for the first time at the Theatre des Mathurins, Paris, in 1944

Example continued Noon. The clean, brightly lit public room of an inn. Everything is very spick and span. He'll come back. Did he tell you so?

Brief History Text Analysis Tools s Text-analysis tools grew out of concordances: 1247, Concordance to the Vulgate Bible, Paris 1949, Father Busa Index Thomisticus 1970s, Batch Concordancers like OCP 1989, TACT - Interactive Concordancers 1990s, Textual Visualization

What can be done... s Text-analysis tools provide Speed Complex Searches Reconfigured Views Statistics Researchers can generate custom concordances interactively

Concordances and Interpretation s Concordances provide an alternative arrangement of the text that brings passages together into a concordantia. s Interpretative strategy where answers are drawn from the text by assembling passages on the subject in question and reading this rearranged text as a meaningful whole. s Concordance facilitates this rearrangement providing alternative views.

Types of Text-Analysis s Stylistic Describing author’s style and comparing it Authorship studies s Linguistic Create representative corpus Describe linguistic use (diachronic or synchronic) s Thematic Finding patterns (words & phrases) in a text Following themes through a work Comparing themes Demands a reiterative reading

Problematic equations That a theme is the passages where a set of words appear Can themes be identified by key words? What about ambiguous words? That concording passages into a new text is an acceptable interpretative strategy Where does the passage start and end around a word? Is reading a rearranged text appropriate? That the distribution of words indicates the progress of a theme Do the number of hits indicate intensity of theme?

What’s the connection Interpretation (Understanding) Surface Measurement (Quantification)

Two Views Text-analysis is about proving things about texts vStylistic analysis provides reproducible descriptions of authors style vMeasurement of surface features allows us to prove more interesting points vReaction to impressionistic reader oriented literary theory Text-analysis is the rereading a text in ways that help one better understand it vText-analysis is only one of many strategies vText-analysis reveals anomalies to be researched vText-analysis is useful precisely because the computer can’t do well what human readers do well, and can do other things well

E-Text Research Project Planning Prototyping Scanning or Buying Proofing Traditional Research Markup Interactive Study Planning Phase Implementation Phase Research Phase Publication

Obtaining an E-text s Acquire one from someone else. Oxford Text Archive Search the Internet using WWW Commercial Vendors s Create it yourself Scan it using OCR software OCR = Optical Character Recognition Type it in or hire services for input Markup Validate