In Hanover: SAS and Synclaviers

By John Skow

Steady, now: one delicate shudder, then to business. Water with the pill? Fine. Here we are in Hanover, N.H., where the Dartmouth College campus quickens to the approach of the fall term and a few of the weaker maple trees are beginning to turn orange. The occasion is the Fourth International Conference on Computers and--what is this?--the Humanities. Is the conference title a self-contradiction, like "fresh-frozen" or "Young Republican"? The observer, a humanist in a dry season, resolutely programs himself to suppress his real attitude toward computers, which is a feeling of smugness and superiority masking a feeling of inferiority and hysteria. This dates from an episode ten years ago when he was living in Salzburg, Austria, and a computer sent all of his Diners' Club bills by surface mail to Salisbury, Australia, but then unaccountably caught its error each month in time to send the subsequent "pay up or die" threats winging directly to Salzburg.

It is not long before preconceptions begin to fall away --some of them to be later picked up, dusted off and restored to use. The assembled scholars are classics professors, archaeologists, Shakespeareans, graphic artists, historians and musicians flown in from Norway, Israel, England, Canada, France, India and West Germany, as well as from the U.S. Most of them no longer consider themselves to be innovators merely because they work with computers. These days money does not invariably fall out of academia's apple trees when the word computer appears in grant proposals. So says Stephen V.F. Waite, a research associate in computing in the humanities at Dartmouth, and an assistant professor of classics.

Waite, who organized this ICCH/4 conference, might be computer-classified in the "skinny, mild-mannered, wears glasses, enthusiastic" subset of the "professor" category. He likes computers so much that he bought an array of Hewlett-Packard hardware (central processing unit, disc drive, digital tape unit, hardcopy printer, typesetter) with his own money. He set the rig up in his house, and he helps pay off the $70,000 cost by running a one-man computer typesetting business on the side. Waite's machines are on display at the conference. A Los Angeles-based colleague named David Packard has been using them to demonstrate a Greek language program. Packard seems to have changed the locks, because when Waite begins noodling with his computer, the thing turns balky and refuses, despite cajoling, to come "up" (awaken and get to work). A computer is either "up" or "down."

Waite, undiscouraged, says that in 1968 he became the second classics student at Harvard to use a computer for Ph.D. thesis research. Now, Waite adds, it is "not outlandish, though still not common" for a Ph.D. candidate in classics to use a computer. There is still resentment though: "I know of humanities departments in which you would not get tenure if you did use computers."

In the rich, fruity tones of the classroom vaudevillian or the dusty mumble of the archives burrower, scholars at the Dartmouth conference "interface" on such matters as "Semantic Networks, Frames and a Conventional Data Base Methodology" and "Controlled Random Generated Parameter Definition." At any given time, several papers are being delivered. What a wanderer discovers depends on which classroom door he opens. It also depends on how familiar he becomes with such terms as COBOL, SAS and FORTRAN (computer languages) and lemmatization (grouping together the variant forms of the same word). Not to mention all-purpose academic sentence deadeners like parameters (a specific statistical term used loosely to mean limits).

Accounts fly about of such worthy and weighty computer projects as the compiling of vast concordances and the storage and retrieval of texts (Latin and Greek at Dartmouth, 17th and 18th century English at Cleveland State University). Machine translation projects may be emerging from a decade of disrepute brought on by unrealistically high expectations that foundered on the marvelous complexities of language. No one in the corridors at Dartmouth thinks that literary translations will ever be done by computer-- War and Peace in Russian fed into one end of the machine with a readable English version emerging at the other. But machine translation may work with technical prose of sharply limited vocabulary.

Walk through the right door and there is Peter J. McGuire of Georgia Tech moving determinedly "Toward the Development of an Algorithm Permitting Computer Evaluation of Coherence in Prose." An algorithm is a mathematical scheme followed to solve a problem, not so? Very well, forward march: McGuire, a young man who teaches English to technicians, had noticed a kind of student writing that produced in the reader the feeling that he had learned a lot, but could not remember anything. The trouble? Lack of coherence. What helps coherence? A lot of sturdy ordinals--"firsts," "seconds," "thirds--and plenty of vigorous "thus-es." What hurts coherence? Free-floating "this-es" and "these-es" that do not refer back to anything, not to mention phony locutions like "From this, we can see that..." when in fact nothing is in sight. Possible solution? Run a lot of student papers already graded for coherence or lack of it through a computer to count positive and negative elements, compare with readers' reactions, refine and rework the process, and repeat. Result? Cautious optimism, says the coherent and careful McGuire.

And at the same session--a gold mine! --a rousing stump speech by Carolyn Chiterer Gilboa, a medievalist turned teacher of remedial English at the Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is a sturdy, funny, pugnacious and acutely intelligent woman in the middle of middle age, the sort of teacher every student should have a constitutional right to at least one of. She points out that a student can be graduated in the top third of a New York City high school class and be a functional illiterate. If you have a bright illiterate who has had twelve years of education, she says, something in the educational system is out of phase with something in the student. Suspecting impoverished vocabularies, she ran computer tallies on essays written by freshmen-- blacks mostly, with a few Southern whites and New York City blue-collar whites-- who clearly required remedial teaching. What she found was something quite different. "And that's where computers are so useful," she says. "You start out with a hunch, but the computer shows you patterns that you never suspected were there." The patterns she found --repeated use of proverbs and formulaic expressions, use of capitalized words for emphasis, and the simplification of hard-to-say consonants at the ends of words (wealf" for wealth," "could" for couldn't" --were those of people to whom a composition meant a speech or sermon, not an essay written down on paper. These students had heard a lot of fundamentalist preaching, but they had not read much literature. What had seemed simply wrong in the cadences of their own writing began to make sense when compared with those, say, of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. "Well," says Gilboa, "you start with what they have, which is not simply a bunch of mistakes, but an oral tradition."

Musicians are among the liveliest of the interfacers. The Hanover star is Jon Appleton, 40, a Dartmouth music professor and co-inventor of a portable electronic synthesizer called a Synclavier. This machine uses a small but very powerful $7,000 computer. A musician can perform as a soloist at the Synclavier keyboard, then assume the role of conductor and call up and blend recorded sounds from the computer's memory.

The Synclavier is larger than a breadbox. It is smaller than a piano. It is not portable in the one-armed sense. But two arms will heft it. The complex sounds produced can resemble drums or clarinets or bassoons or sound like no instrument ever invented. Once, in Dartmouth's Spaulding Auditorium, Appleton's wife Elisabeth danced an austere and elegant accompaniment while the professor played.

A complete Synclavier costs $14,700. The Tangerine Dream, a German rock group, has one. So does Jazzman Herbie Hancock. Somewhat bemusedly, Appleton notes that research now going on probably will teach the Synclavier to talk. But, he adds, it will not be able to talk and play music at the same time. The observer thanks Appleton and goes home to consider parameters.

-- John Skow

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