The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities ed. by George P. Landow and Paul Delany (review)

The availability of self-contained microcontrollers at manageable prices is a major reason for the sudden change In the way robotics is done, and has made hobby robotics a growth industry. Associated factors include the possibility of micro-robots and the subsumption architecture of Rodney Brooks. The Brooks approach shies away from the computationally expensive top-down approach to robotics inherited from traditional Artificial Intelligence and looks at the behavior of insects for inspiration. Subsumption architecture has proven to be a vigorous and exciting alternative to tradition . It is therefore appropriate that this book should have arisen from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab-specifically , from Rodney Brooks's mobile robot group. Mobile Robots is an instruction book for building one specific robot, which the authors call Rug Warrior. It is small, constructed from Lego toy-building parts, and has a simple set of sensors. But it has some reasonably sophisticated behavior, due to the 68 HCll micro -processor at its heart (or brain). The great value of the book is the methodical and accessible way it discusses basic theory, leading the reader to a technical understanding of basic components and circuit design. (There is the occasional anomaly, however, such as a discussion of transistors that offers no definition for the term "bias. ") Along the way, the book offers a view into the current state of robotics research and technological developments , citing both low- and high-tech examples. While explaining how to build Rug Warrior, Mobile Robots offers a wealth of tips for building, customizing and scavenging hardware, including motors and sensors. This knowledge clearly arises from years of hands-on experience in the lab. The authors are also generous with information about supply sources, offering several excellent appendices that list suppliers and mail order catalogs. From my perspective, however, the book's approach is remarkably imbalanced. I believe this is due to the rather skewed profile the authors have of the "average robotics hobbyist" from their vantage point at MIT. The book assumes that the reader has a background in programming and engineering math, but no experience with electrical , electronic or mechanical building projects. My guess is that this assumed profile is not that of the 362 Reviews book's average reader. I found that Mobile Robots labored over basic tinkerers' skills, but glossed through impenetrable engineering equations as if they were a shopping list. (The chapter on motors is the best example of this.) If beyond the scope of the book, it is quite reasonable to teach programming , and the authors do offer Rug Warrior's entire code in an appendix. The code is written in Interactive C, a variety of C written at MIT and available free of charge by FTP (file transfer protocol). Although Mobile Robots focuses on one particular device, the skills and tips it offers can be applied to diverse projects. It is an excellent book, the best I have seen on the topic since Robot Builders Bonanza appeared some years ago. Its treatment of micro-processors is also quite timely. THE DIGITAL WORD: TEXTBASED COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES edited by George P. Landow and Paul Delany. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. ISBN: 0-262-12 I76-X. Reviewed by Richard Ross, Interactive Arts, Gwent CollegeofHigher Education, Wales, NP61Xj E-mail: The Digital Word continues Landow and Delaney's exploration of new tools in the humanities (for "humanists"). Their previous collection, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, examined the use of hypertext and hypermedia to free up the internal structure of the text. This new book covers a rather broader area, ranging from the global electronic distribution of literary works (e.g., through the international Text Encoding Initiative [TEl]) and the electronic global forum of debate and exchange among humanist scholars (electronic mail and conferencing) to computer-assisted literary research and text management (mainly, markup systems). A good half of the contributors are professors of English or Literature, two thirds have worked developing software for use in these areas and one is described rather mysteriously as someone who works for the United States government but enjoys writing programs to help people in his spare time. Much of the software mentioned in the articles is free and details...