FW: Tinasky TRP? (was Dharma)

[Sherwood, Harrison]

(Forwarded for Henry the K., who has now received his baptism by fire
into the PList, having discovered the Reply to Sender/Group feature of
this list. Welcome aboard, Henry!)

>----------
>From: 	Henry Kingman
>Sent: 	Monday, September 22, 1997 10:42 PM
>To: 	Sherwood, Harrison
>Subject: 	Re: Tinasky TRP? (was Dharma)
>
>Sherwood, Harrison wrote:
>
>> Many's been the time when I've wanted to access a searchable version
>> of
>> the texts, so's I could look for, oh, I dunno, "Christ's true pity"
>> within 25 lines of "speculum," or some such.
>>
>> Or would this be a violation of copyright so heinous as to bring to a
>> sudden heat-death human civilization and all that it stands for?
>
>You refer, natch, to the LITERARY CONCORDANCE, of which there are many
>in print form. I've seen online concordances for Shakespeare, Dickenson,
>Conrad, a few others... and you may turn up one for TRP if you searched
>on the term concordance...
>
>The sort of software best suited to assembling a literary concordance
>would likely to TEXT SEARCH AND RETRIEVAL software, such as the
>off-the-shelf products for consumers from ALTA VISTA, OPEN TEXT and
>likely many others -- could use Lotus Notes if you were really
>desperate, maybe...
>
>These create an INDEX of each word and group of words that appears in a
>body of text, with links to the original works in some cases. Such an
>index takes considerable time to compile and will likely be very large,
>but once it exists it can provide extremely fast answers to questions
>such as those you have asked above.
>
>This sort of indexing technology underlies all the Internet search
>engines, which create indexes of the entire Web and Newsgroup corpus (in
>the cases of Alta Vista and OpenText sites) or of first headings and
>Meta tag information in the case of many other less literal search
>engines.
>
>In any case, you can buy text search and retrieval software and let it
>loose on a given author's canon and gain the ability to perform powerful
>searches on this work that take mere seconds to complete. My guess is
>that some major university out there is compiling, even as we speak, a
>massive concordance of all the great works of literature, soon to be
>marketed on a per-drink basis as soon as THAT technology becomes more
>established.
>
>Henry
>
>---
>"Imagine how difficult a time our children will have understanding how
>tough it was to find information in the pre-Internet era." -- Brian Del
>Vecchio
>
> 
>
>