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  £45

Reviewed by 

Robin Hodge

    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.