ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS AND ELIZABETHAN TEXTS

Abstract

Librarians, archivists, linguists, and studonts of literature aro rapidly coning to realizo that oloctronic conputors, or, bottor, dataprocossing nachines, can help to solvo problems in fields ordinarily regarded as renoto fron the world of advanced technology. Already there is a forrddablo bibliography of books and articles discussing automation in the library, automatic soarch and indexing of document s, automatic linguistic analysis, and automatic translation. So far as I know, however, no papers havo boon published on the application of electronic aids to the solution of problems in Elizabethan scholarship. The chief purpose of the present essay is to stimulate wider discussion of the possible uses of comg putor-prepared concordances to and magnetic tape files of Elizabethan texts, I should like at the outset to acknowledge cy debt to ny oolleague Professor Stephen M. Parrish, who introduced ne to the mysteries of computers and who has answered my many queries with invariable kindness and lucidity,