The PAST MASTERS series from the InteLex Corporation is a publishing venture that is speeding up the pace at which the meaning of the verb to read is undergoing far-reaching change, now that electronic media are tending to replace paper as the first choice for scholarly perusing and search in texts.
The pleasures and the rewards of reading a good tactile real book, printed on paper, and having obvious weighty mass, are not disputed. But it is obvious that for many purposes or tasks, or even moods, electronic texts work best. Anyone who has become familiar with using or preparing texts whose lengths are easily measured in terms of K's - just about everyone who uses a PC - will know the gains that may be won when texts are given electronically as e-texts, rather than by ink on paper.
Many a 1980's and 1990's scholar who has taken a PC into use has wished that the great classic texts of his subject - those true fountains of telling phrases, remarks, points to remember and authoritative distinctions - were on disc and as accessible for quick search as are his own files from the past few months' work. Where did Plato make his dramatic character, Socrates, say; "We learn Geometry through working out examples"? Or, where exactly did Hobbes say that "Words are wise men's counters - they do but reckon by them"? These are the kind of questions that crop up in the humanities, and they often crop up just when time is short.
What used to be looking for something or other in large texts, may now be conducting searches instead. The looking for that used to take ages, and perhaps was either never finished or finished only through good luck, may now, with electronic texts, take a very short time indeed, and end with definite results. Among those who are aware of the gains that may be had from using electronic texts there is a demand for some new kinds of publishing. InteLex Corporation has seen this clearly, and has responded with something that is far more than a mere speculative commercial bid for a potentially lucrative market. It has published electronic editions of classic texts in the humanities. But it has done more. It has taken the most authoritative previous editions of these works, compared them, and in cases of discrepancies has judiciously resolved them or listed them as variants.
It has done still more. Taking the view that even electronic editions of very large amounts of text-material would still be somewhat cumbersome when accessed with normal word-processors, InteLex Corporation made a bold decision to publish them already fully processed for access by the very powerful text-retrieval programme VIEWS of the Folio Corporation. What one has with the publication of the InteLex editions of classics in the humanities is a combination of the best of thoroughly reliable editions of these works together with the facilities of what is probably the most impressive text-retrieval package available for use with personal computers.
The first releases include editions of major works of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume; Thomas Hobbes; John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Henry Sidgwick; leading modern translations of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza. Also available are composite databases for Political Philosophy, Economics, and one for Kierkegaard's writings. Due out in the summer 1991 are: complete works of Spinoza in Latin and Dutch; major works and selected correspondence of Descartes in Latin, French and (authorized by Descartes) French translation; Plato and Aristotle (in modern English translations); Kant and Hegel (in modern English translations and German).
To use PAST MASTERS is to have one's eyes opened to very interesting new opportunities and even new possibilities for scholarly work with large bodies of texts. An hour or so is all that is required for becoming familiar with the primary search and display functions of the built-in VIEWS text-retrieval programme, and these functions are impressive. Each data base, text base, or "infobase", is divided into small manageable units called "folios", which are usually paragraphs but may be footnotes or other easily and strategically distinguished small segments of text. Searching begins actually during the typing of a search request, and search requests may consist of words or phrases, logic operators, parentheses for nested searches, groups and wildcards. As the search request is being typed a scrolling window shows the words of the index that satisfy the request as it has been typed so far, and a results window shows how many folios satisfy the developing search request. The complete text of every folio satisfying the search request is then displayed with the chosen word or words highlighted. Moving from folio to folio could not be simpler. There are also link-tokens that make it possible to move quickly from one part of the text to other parts that have an information-connection to the folio marked with the starting link-token. Items in a table of contents, for example, would be marked with such link-tokens, for immediate viewing of the relevant parts of the text.
VIEWS makes it extremely easy to criss-cross through these works according to however fancy and fleeting thoughts may strike, and in many kinds of work in the humanities, fancy and fleeting thoughts, of course, are the vital elements of the kind of pursuit that makes research deeply satisfying. The best and surest way to avoid unnecessary disagreement with this is to try it and see!
There is a surprising point to notice about how InteLex e-text editions make very economical use of disk space. Although Folio VIEWS puts the whole text of the data-base and the index of every single word of the text into a single file, the resulting single file is just over half the size of the original text file. It manages this by using its own patented compression technique. This gives the result that for the Political Philosophy data-base, for example, the original data-base files totalled 11.5 MB approximately, while the Folio file amounted to only 7 MB.
Much might be said about this PAST MASTERS series. But it is not the intention, nor would it be appropriate, here to outline all or most of the facilities of the InteLex PAST MASTERS series. The intention here is to pass on the message to those who have not yet heard, that such a series exists, that it is being steadily added to, that it does superbly well what it was meant to do and what many hoped it would be capable of doing. It will go a very long way towards giving a good name to the whole enterprise of arranging e-text editions of classic works as material for scholarly work. Those who decide to investigate PAST MASTERS further, have a great pleasure in store. It might even lead to philosophizing more vigorously about how words work, and what texts are meant to do - questions that the authors of many of the works in the PAST MASTERS series have themselves tried to treat!
Ralph Jewell is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen.
