Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002
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Hockey, Susan, Electronic Texts in the Humanities,
New
York, Oxford University Press, 2000, 216pp, ISBN 0-19-871194-8
Reviewed by
Professor Hockey’s book looks largely at the contextual analysis of computer
use throughout the Humanities. She introduces a range of tools and techniques
for manipulating and analysing electronic texts within a broad approach
assessing the ways in which research and computational linguistics can feed the
diverse areas of literary analysis, linguistic analysis, authorship attribution
and the preparation and publication of electronic scholarly editions.
Whilst
that may sound as if Hockey is presenting us with some sort of taxonomic
procession of electronic verbage that would be unjust and most unfair. What is
presented are the multifarious tools and techniques developed over the years by
humanities computing experts in an enlightening and informative way. As Hockey
says the book seeks to explain the intellectual rationale for electronic text
technology in the humanities focusing on method showing how an emphasis on same
can help define and refine research objectives. The book is widely discursive
therefore, having to look at investigations into sampling text, encoding
schemata, text analysis principles, electronic dictionaries, lexical databases
as well as being brave enough to speculate on future research within the
electronic arena.
It
should be pointed out however that he book is not about using the internet
- it is about those tools and techniques which at present are not
available in that medium. Tools that rightly should be accessible - tools indeed
that would make research a much more enriching and far reaching experience.
In that context it is right and proper that cyberspace is excluded from
the main body of the text here with the interest and writing centred in relation
to electronic scholarly editions.
The
book is extremely well researched with some excellent choreography between
chapters, excelling in areas such as stylometry and dictionaries but especially
with an understanding of text retrieval programs that goes further than many
other authors. Hockey therefore is able to pinpoint such research assets as
models and paradigms of linguistic investigations exploring typographical as
well as historical data. Scholars will find much here to enable a wider and
deeper research study into texts whether it be medieval English, the use of
verbs in Shakespeare scripts or contemporary dictionaries.
A
worrying aspect of the work is that an understanding of the central computing
issues must still be mastered. Hockey understands this and states emphatically
in her final chapter that she feels that software development
is lagging behind. It is a worrying thought that non computing
“experts” must find a myriad of ways around the gray box in front of them in
order to engage in their research in a thorough manner. There are no easy
options open for the humanities scholar other than to do a wider study of the
electronic backgrounds inherent to textual exploration. What is paramount in
this area are usability studies centred on human and computer interaction .
Certainly it would be more than useful to have research scholars working in an
easy to understand fashion, using intuition and usable text context tools rather
than the computational XSL, SGML etc. Hypertext mark up language and its
derivatives are not easy to understand, it takes some time to have a full
comprehension of the nuances of these source communiqués. It is reasonable to
assume that at this point in time scholars feel it essential to use such
languages - however if we want to look to the future rapid progress must be made
within user centered design processes for our lexographers etc.