Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 272.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 07:16:14 +0100
From: John Bradley <john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 14.0258 methodological primitives?
Willard: I would certainly support anyone who took the view that
Wilhelm Ott's TuStep system provides a very solid set of "primitives"
for the scholarly manipulation of text. I have spent many hours of
time examining their design (although I confess that my actual
experience of using them has been very limited indeed) and can well
appreciate that they could be combined to deal with a very large
number of text manipulation needs. Anyone seriously interested in
thinking about what a design needs to include in detail would benefit
much from examining TuStep in this way.
The approach towards tools for generalised processing shown in TuStep
is, from the computing perspective, a very old one -- but at the same
time it is a model that is still often applied when a computing
professional needs to do a complex computing task him/herself. The
UNIX environment with its basic "filtering" tools, a sorting
program, some programmable text-oriented editors, and things like
Perl, are based in very similar approaches.
In Object Oriented (OO) design, there is a another way to design
processing which is these days very much in fashion. One perhaps key
difference: Object Oriented design blurs the distinction Willard made
in his first posting on this subject between data and process, and I
think this makes a dramatic difference in the way one looks at the
whole issue. It seems particularly well suited for modelling
processes that involve the production of "interactive" and
"GUI-based" systems. I don't know of anyone, however, who has managed
to take OO design and apply it in quite the way implied here -- as a
basis for the construction of primitives that non-programmers could
adapt for specific tasks. However, the original OO language --
Smalltalk -- >was< designed to allow non-programmer users (children)
to create significant applications of their own, and it retains, I
think, some of this flavour of supporting the combination of
experiment, development and processing in a single environment.
Furthermore, I know of people who have a set of powerful objects (in
Smalltalk, it turns out) they use and enhance over and over again to
accomplish very sophisticated text manipulation tasks.
Any tool meant to support activities as diverse as those that turn up
in humanities text-based computing cannot possibly be trivial to
learn or use. The level of professionalism and commitment required
for a full use of TuStep is, I think, roughly comparable to that
required to learn to work with, say, Perl, or (I think) Smalltalk and
text-oriented Smalltalk objects.
Best wishes. ... john b
----------------------
John Bradley
john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk
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