Computer applications in the humanities: a SNOBOL4 procedure for conflating the variants produced by textual collation

Abstract

Highly trained humanists who edit literary texts now spend vast amounts of time in what is universally acknowledged to be the necessary but tedious comparison of texts and the sorting and merging of the variants between the editions. The computer has the capability to relieve much of this drudgery and do the job more rapidly and accurately than can humans. A research project in computerized textual comparison is currently underway at Mississippi State University. This paper discusses one phase of this project, a procedure for the computerized production of a report giving the conflated (merged) results of collating (comparing character-by-character) any number of texts. This procedure, which is implemented in the SNOBOL4 programming language, is described and discussed in terms of the overall goals and efforts of the total research project.