Book details of 'Using Tact With Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text-Analysis Computing Tools: Version 2.1 for MS-DOS and PC DOS'

Title	Using Tact With Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text-Analysis Computing Tools: Version 2.1 for MS-DOS and PC DOS
Author(s)	Ian Lancashire, John Bradley, Willard McCarty, Michael Stairs, T. R. Wooldridge
ISBN	0873525698
Language	English
Published	December 1996
Publisher	Modern Language Association of America

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
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
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