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(A work in progress: comments?)
The Humanities Digital Information Service (HDIS) began
in the early 1980s as a project of Malcolm Brown (currently of Dartmouth
College), then a professor of German literature at Stanford. Initially
the organization was called simply Information Resources, although its
primary purpose, then as now, was to provide electronic access to humanities
texts for the purposes of research and teaching.
Although similar activities and organizations became much
more popular in the later 1980s and 1990s, during most of the earlier
decade Stanford was one of only a few venues of what would come to be
called “humanities computing.” We developed our own program for
text searching and delivery, called the Searcher. This program used
a mark-up scheme that was unique to Stanford, and had been developed by
Brown.
Sometime during the 1980s we received a grant from Apple
to develop the Searcher into a
full-fledged client-server application
which would serve the needs of the entire University community, and especially
the faculty and student body of the humanities. We used the Pat search
engine, from OpenText Corporation, on the server, and eventually developed
a Macintosh-only Searcher client similar to what had been developed for
the OED Browser, one of the first large projects of what was eventually
called Academic Information Resources (AIR), and then the Academic Text
Service (ATS).
Stergios Marinopoulos, one of the original programmers
of our text-searching programs, contributed the following notes about
them:
I wanted to provide a few more details of the first
version of a Pat-based client/server version. I wrote the original unix
server for Pat, and Jayson Adams wrote the first client which was NeXT
based. We did this work in the summer of 1989, under the direction of
Steve Loving and George Drapeau.
George Drapeau later took over the maintenance of the
unix server, and Rick Wong then wrote a version of the client for the
Mac.
Every version of Pat that we used was SGML-based, and
every version of the unix server I wrote performed PAT queries using
SGML-formatted and then indexed documents.
It was at this juncture that Alison Reid succeeded Malcolm
Brown as the director of the project, and the library of electronic texts
continued to grow. Selection of texts was made mostly on request
from faculty members: texts were scanned from books, processed with an
OCR program, proofread, and then marked up in the proprietary Searcher
format. Then each was put online - that is, a set of Pat indexes
was created, and the interface configured - on the Searcher server.
From there, members of the Stanford academic community could access the
texts using the Searcher client on their networked Macintosh. The
client software was at first distributed directly to users by ATS personnel,
who gave private tutorials and classroom presentations explaining both
how to use the software, and how computing could help in the study of
the humanities. ATS hoped to bridge the gap between the humanities
and computing, which must have seemed quite antithetical to the humanistic
mindset and methodologies - especially in the days before the World Wide
Web so forcefully brought computerized texts before the eyes of the world.
Jim Coleman, who succeeded Alison Reid as head of ATS,
took the Stanford electronic library a major leap forward on two fronts:
accessibility and longevity. First, he moved the text collections
from a strictly client-server model to one available over the Web to anyone
in the Stanford community without the need for specialized, client-side
software. This involved the entire rewriting of the program for text delivery.
We were fortunate to have the services of one of the original programmers
for The Searcher, Rick Wong, who wrote the new program, which is called
Hugo. At the same time, thanks to developments in the larger humanities
computing community, it was decided that our proprietary markup should
be converted to something more universally understandable, supported,
and stable: SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language), most often in
an implementation for humanities materials known as the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI). The mark-up for the original library had to be
changed, and this migration is still underway. Additionally, we
began to acquire a large number of text collections offered commercially,
mostly by Chadwyck-Healey Corporation.
The newly-named (since Fall, 1999) Humanities Digital
Information Service has added a public presence to our previous, primarily
virtual, venue. We are located in the restored Lane Room, on the
second floor of Green Library, Bing Wing, where we offer a number of on-site
resources and services.
Thanks to Peter Burchard for contributing
research and prose for this history.
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