The Alexander concordance again, from first principles

This is all that remains of a talk I gave on Friday, 2nd October 2009, celebrating the work of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre at Cambridge, at the time of its final closure. The talk was a single 15 minute slot among many others, and the whole day was recorded, but as far as I know the recording was never in any sense made public. The basis of the talk was the laborious effort of making a concordance of an Early Middle High German poem, Lamprecht’s Alexander (or Alexanderlied) in 1968, with the ease of repeating the exercise in 2009. The first time took a year to get it done, the second time just a couple of days.

Unfortunately the talk missed the note of the occasion somewhat: I had expected an audience of literary scholars, but found myself mainly talking to the Cambridge Univerity Computing Service, and David Hartley, formerly director of the Computing Service, I felt he took my comments on the conditions in 1968 somewhat personally. But I may have been wrong.

I never wrote up the talk, but I did keep the images for the overhead projector. Here they are.

The bad old days: The computing resources of 40 years ago.

The published concordance. A sample page.

The new concordance. Same page.

Editing the text. Errors from various sources.

Packing words into integers. One way of speeding up the sort.

The program. (If you’re interested.)

The data. (If you’re interested.)

A modern concordance

In the second half of the talk I tried to explain how the traditional concordance, as out of date now as tables of seven figure logarithms, can be usefully replaced by a suitably adapted search technique. For illustration I used the King James Bible, with sample queries, put together with my own retrieval software. This illustration is still in place, and you can click on the queries below to see what I mean. Beware of the last one, which gives you the entire bible.

http://tartarus.org/martin/bible on the web.

Some queries,

leviathan   All verses, and there are only 4.
church   All verses, and of course they are only in the New Testament.
love   All verses. It also picks up loves, loving, loveth ... (Porter stemming)
grinding the face of the poor   1 verse. I know it is somewhere in the Bible, but where?
"and it came to pass in those days"   All verses. A repeating phrase.
lord god   The whole bible.

How this ended

Alas, I ran out of time going through these queries, and explaining the simple biblical facts that they illustrated. But I suspect the audience was not too interested anyway. I was however able to end on a humorous note. When I got the source of the Alexander text from the LLCC I found that certain errors spotted in 1968 had never been corrected. I put the corrections in while redoing the work, and was able to present it back to what remained of the organisation on the day of its closure. It had originally been prepared in paper-tape form, and the collection of paper tapes numbered 1, 2, 3 ... had been stored in a three or four cardboard boxes. But I announced that now we were fully up-to-date, the days of punched paper tape had, thank goodness, long since gone, and I could give it back to them in the fully modern form of a five and a quarter inch floppy disk, which I then produced.

Laughter all round.