DONALD
ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota
with David Hunter, "u-EYEBALL: An Interactive System for
Producing Stylistic Descriptions and Comparisons," Computers and
the Humanities 28 (1994): 1-11.
We have revised the mainframe EYEBALL, written in the early 1970s and
used by several researchers during that decade, to run on
microprocessors. This program parses English language texts and
provides a statistical description of many linguistic features which
are of interest to those involved in stylistics. In order to produce
an analytical approach which goes beyond the simple reporting of
linguistic data, we have selected a small number of features which
characterize noticeable elements of the language used and we have
written programs to facilitate statistical comparisons among texts.
While EYEBALL is not automatic, the interactive parsing routines are
elegant enough that the users spend most of their time confirming
accurate guesses, rather than having to determine the structure of
each phrase and clause. We hope that the program will be used by
humanities scholars who have not previously been inclined to wrestle
with the barriers of mainframe computing in the past.
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Ross
Last revised 15 November 1999
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