BKUTACTE.RVW   990613

"Using TACT with Electronic Texts", Ian Lancashire, 1996,
0-87352-569-8, U$50.00
%A   Ian Lancashire
%C   10 Astor Place, New York, NY   10003-6981
%D   1996
%G   0-87352-569-8
%I   The Modern Language Association of America
%O   U$50.00 fax: 212-477-9863 permissions@mla.org
%P   361 p. + CD-ROM
%T   "Using TACT with Electronic Texts"

TACT (Text-Analysis Computing Tools) is a suite of programs used to
produce data about literature for criticism and interpretation in
humanities studies.  This book is a manual for the programs, which
were developed by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the
University of Toronto, and appear to be distributed as freeware.  The
tools are based on the activity of concordancing, or finding all
occurrences of a term in a given piece of text.  The standard UNIX
tools of grep, sed, and awk will do the same thing.  How TACT differs
is very difficult to say.  The manual is not very forthcoming, seeming
to imply, by its lack of explanation, that if you don't know what the
tools do, you don't deserve to know.  Computer specific terms are
described and explained, but those to do with literature or technical
criticism are defined, if at all, in a circular and tautological
manner.

Chapter one outlines the different programs and what part of the
process they perform, but since the outcome isn't illustrated this
material is less than helpful to the newcomer.  The largest, and most
important, part of chapter two deals with the insertion of tags into a
text, but this section is incomplete, and no reference seems to exist
for the full set of tags that can be used.  The operation of Makebase
and Mergebas, used to create text databases in the proper format, is
described in chapter three.  The interactive analysis tool, Usebase,
is outlined in chapters four through seven.  Chapter eight reviews the
batch analysis programs.  Preprocessing programs are explained in
chapter nine, and postprocessing in chapter ten.  Chapter eleven
probably should have started the book, since it finally attempts to
talk about what TACT actually does, and even gives examples of use for
the UNIX tools mentioned earlier.  However, the material relies too
heavily on large works that have been accomplished by computerized
methods, without suggesting smaller questions and how they might be
approached.  A reference to the suite, explanation of the texts
included on the CD-ROM, and some other appendices are included.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999   BKUTACTE.RVW   990613