Scholars have discovered that many of the methods of interpretation and
analysis that are related to both quantitative and qualitative methods
are processes that can be performed by computers. For example, computers
can count. They can count brush strokes used in a Rembrandt painting or
perform regression analysis for understanding cause and effect. By means
of advanced technologies, computers can recognize patterns, analyze text,
and model concepts. Furthermore, computers can complete these processes
faster with more sources and with greater precision than scholars who
must rely on manual interpretation of data. But if scholars are to use
computers for these processes, source materials must be in a form
amenable to computer-assisted analysis. For this reason many scholars,
once they have identified the sources that are key to their research, are
converting them to machine-readable form. Thus, a representative example
of the numerous textual conversion projects organized by scholars around
the world in recent years to support computational text analysis is the
TLG, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. This project is devoted to
converting the extant ancient texts of classical Greece. (Editor's note:
according to the TLG Newsletter of May l992, TLG was in use in thirty-two
different countries. This figure updates MICHELSON's previous count by one.)
The scholars performing these conversions have been asked to recognize
that the electronic sources they are converting for one use possess value
for other research purposes as well. As a result, during the past few
years, humanities scholars have initiated a number of projects to
increase scholarly access to converted text. So, for example, the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI), about which more is said later in the program,
was established as an effort by scholars to determine standard elements
and methods for encoding machine-readable text for electronic exchange.
In a second effort to facilitate the sharing of converted text, scholars
have created a new institution, the Center for Electronic Texts in the
Humanities (CETH). The center estimates that there are 8,000 series of
source texts in the humanities that have been converted to
machine-readable form worldwide. CETH is undertaking an international
search for converted text in the humanities, compiling it into an
electronic library, and preparing bibliographic descriptions of the
sources for the Research Libraries Information Network's (RLIN)
machine-readable data file. The library profession has begun to initiate
large conversion projects as well, such as American Memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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