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Traditional discourses upon literature have been predicated upon the ability to refer to a text that others may consult (Landow, 1994, p. 33). Texts that involve elements of feedback and non-trivial decision-making on the part of the reader (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1) therefore present a challenge to readers and critics alike. Since a persuasive case has been made against a critical method that sets out to ``identify the task of interpretation as a task of territorial exploration and territorial mastery'' (Aarseth, p. 87), this paper proposes the use of readers in an empirically based approach to hypertext fiction. Meta-interpretation, a method that combines individual responses to a text, reading logs, screen recordings and limited qualitative/quantitative analysis, and critical interpretation is outlined. By analysing readers' responses it is possible to suggest both the ways that textual elements may have influenced or determined readers' choices and the ways that readers' choices ``configure'' the text. The method thus addresses Espen Aarseth's concerns and illuminates interesting features of interactive processes in fictional environments. The paper is divided into two parts: the first part sketches out meta-interpretation through consideration of the main problems confronting the literary critic; the second part describes reading research aimed at generating data for the literary critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallel to, and to some degree in reaction to French poststructuralist theorization (as championed by Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, among others) is a French neo-structuralism built directly on the achievements of structuralism using electronic means. This paper examines some exemplary approaches to text analysis in this neo-structuralist vein: SATOR's topoi dictionary, the WinBrill POS tagger and François Rastier's interpretative semantics. I consider how a computer-assisted ``Wissenschaft'' accumulation of expertise complements the neo-structuralist approach. Ultimately, electronic critical studies will be defined by their strategic position at the intersection of the two chief technologies shaping our society: the new information processing technology of computers and the representational techniques that have accumulated for centuries in texts. Understanding how these two information management paradigms complement each other is a key issue for the humanities, for computer science, and vital to industry, even beyond the narrow realm of the language industries. The direction of critical studies, a small planet long orbiting in only rarefied academic circles, will be radically altered by the sheer size of the economic stakes implied by a new kind of text, the industrial text, the technological heart of an information society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of papers and books related to the image-based humanities computing. Some of the books enlisted are "Creating and Distributing High Resolution Cartographic Images," by David Yehling Allan, "Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature," edited by Beate Allert, "Introduction to 3-D Spatial Visualization," by , Beverly Baartmans, "IEEE Conference on Information Visualization: An International Conference on Computer Visualization and Graphics," by Ebad Banissi, Farzad Khosrowshahi, and Muhammad Sarfraz and others.

This paper discusses selected aspects of the work of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies, a Centre which has its roots in a 1984 initiative and ceased to operate in 1999. The work of the Centre was grounded in humanities computing, a subject area which itself has developed over time. The article compares earlier observations made by Joseph Raben and Susan Hockey about the integration of resources within humanities teaching and learning, to current realities. Its focus is the development of access to distributed resources, beginning with an interface between the early PC and the mainframe and ending with a vision of a humanities portal to distributed resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes our recent developments in automatic extraction of translation equivalents from parallel corpora. We describe three increasingly complex algorithms: a simple baseline iterative method, and two non-iterative more elaborated versions. While the baseline algorithm is mainly described for illustrative purposes, the non-iterative algorithms outline the use of different working hypotheses which may be motivated by different kinds of applications and to some extent by the languages concerned. The first two algorithms rely on cross-lingual POS preservation, while with the third one POS invariance is not an extraction condition. The evaluation of the algorithms was conducted on three different corpora and several pairs of languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two important strategies in computer-assisted reading and analysis of text (CARAT). The first relates to the classification process, and the second pertains to the categorisation process. These two often-interrelated operations have been regularly recognised as essential components of text analysis. However, the two operations are highly time-consuming. A possible solution to this problem calls upon more inductive or bottom-up strategies that are numerical and statistical in nature. In our own research, we have been exploring a few of these techniques and their combination. We now know, through our own past research and others' work, that the classification methods allow a good empirical thematic exploration of a corpus. More specifically, in this paper we shall concentrate on the problem of assisting the automatic categorisation of small segments of a philosophical text into a set of thematic categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the instructions for authors who submit papers for publication in the "Computers and Humanities" journal. Aims and scope; Manuscript submission; Manuscript presentation; Abstract; Key words; Article types; Transliteration; Figures and tables; Avoiding problems with EPS graphics; Proofs; Offprints; Copyright.

William Faulkner's non-chronological story telling style has long been a challenge to critics and a puzzle to beginning literature students. ``A Rose for Emily,'' one of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, exemplifies the complexity of Faulkner's treatment of time. In this paper, we apply a constraint-based problem solving method to an analysis of the chronology of ``A Rose for Emily.'' Constraint logic programming is a declarative programming language paradigm that solves problems by enforcing constraints among variables. CLP's ability to sort numeric variables that do not yet have definite values makes it possible to sort the events of ``A Rose for Emily'' with only fragmented and relative time information. In attempting to sort the events of the story, we find an inconsistency in the temporal references scattered throughout the narrative. After removing this inconsistency, we are able to compare our chronology with earlier ones and discuss the thematic relevance of Faulkner's nonlinear plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An architecture for federating heterogeneous dictionary databases is described. It proposes a common description language and query language to provide for the exchange of information between databases with different organizations, on different platforms and in different DBMSs. The common query language has an SQL like structure. The first version of the description language follows the TEI standard tag definitions for dictionaries with the expectation that the description language will be expanded in the future. A practical implementation of the proposals using WWW technology for two multi-lingual dictionaries is described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Senseval was the first open, community-based evaluation exercise for Word Sense Disambiguation programs. It took place in the summer of 1998, with tasks for English, French and Italian. There were participating systems from 23 research groups. This special issue is an account of the exercise. In addition to describing the contents of the volume, this introduction considers how the exercise has shed light on some general questions about word senses and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the need of research community, which helps to build the next generation of researchers. It can help young scholars to enhance their knowledge, to develop their skills, build their CV's, prepare for the job market, and to create their own opportunities. And yet many young scholars are working behind splendid walls of isolation in research units, departments, and universities. The author says that he started attending international conferences on Humanities Computing, often as the youngest delegate around. In 1998, when he presented his very first paper for an international audience at DRH in Glasgow, Great Britain, he was surprised to not only find the politeness listeners in the audience, but also senior scholars, major specialists in their field, whom he only knew from reading their articles and books. The immediate contact with these scholars, their useful comments on the author's presentation, and their warm invitation to mail them, anytime, helped him to discover the importance of the professional community for his own research.

Dialectology is the study of dialects, and dialectometry is the measurement of dialect differences, i.e. linguistic differences whose distribution is determined primarily by geography. The earliest works in dialectology showed that language variation is complex both geographically and linguistically and cannot be reduced to simple characterizations. There has thus always been a perceived need for techniques which can deal with large amounts of data in a controlled means, i.e. computational techniques. This special issue of "Computers and the Humanities" presents a range of recent work on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a project called "The Digital Atheneum: New Techniques for Restoring, Searching, and Editing Humanities Collections." In this project, researchers are attempting to reverse some of the damage done to manuscripts in the infamous Cottonian Library fire of 1731, and to make them accessible again through electronic editions. They have chosen to confine their research to heavily damaged manuscripts, because they would presumably master easy problems while striving to solve difficult ones, and they would also make available some currently unusable material for new research. In this group of manuscripts one of the biggest challenges for Anglo-Saxon scholars and computer scientists alike is Cotton Otho B. x, once a large Old English miscellany dominated by saints' lives written by an eleventh century monk.

This article presents a list of key words related to computers and humanities. These key words include adaptive narrative, agglutinative languages, anti-humanism, betagraphy, browsing and navigation in large hypermedia, chronology, codicology, commercial text, computer criticism, computer games, database, electronic literature, electronic text, Elizabethan poems, Elizabethan plays, expert systems, humanities computing, humanism, image, image-based humanities, computing, improvisation, industrial text, infrastructure, interactive, language engineering, literary criticism, literary studies, literary text, literary theory, media studies, morphological disambiguation, morphology analyzer, mutability, performance, posthuman, prediction and proper nouns.

Presents an index to the key words of papers published in volume 35 of "Computers and the Humanities".

This article presents information on a theoretical study of textuality with a practical research proposal. Its ultimate goal is to make a case for new approaches to computerized text analysis. This article will thus reconsider the issues taken up in Laws of Form. The authors want to elucidate some key but neglected formalities of textual documents and to meditate satisfactory ways of communicating those formalities. The author is particularly interested in documents that have been indispensable for traditional humanities disciplines: language and literature, history, philosophy, art. Realizing the need to develop a reliable system for representing such documents in a form that lays them open to the power of digital analysis, humanities computing during the past 20 years worked hard to develop a model for text markup with general applicability.

Discusses the use of audiovisual (AV) documents in the humanities. Full indexing as a condition for the full use of AV documents by scholars; Practices in using AV materials; Proposed representation model for the description of AV material and an exchange format of AV annotations; Influences of digital AV indexing techniques on the scholarly uses of AV documents.

Explains that the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) is welcoming the reader to "Computers and the Humanities." Official journal of the ACH for over a decade; ACH as an international professional organization that brings researchers together from across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.