The Electronic Comedia

FORUM The Electronic Comedia The rapid transmission of data in machine readable formats has for many years now been a staple of the business world. Now, in a number of fields, the same technology is being applied to scholarly subjects, including French and English literatures. The availability of primary texts ready to be read by one's own computer is almost as great a revolution in textual dissemination as the invention of the printing press. Other disciplines , in which scholars can exchange texts either on diskette or by uploading and downloading to a network, are far ahead of Spanish literature , but there is both a nucleus of expertise within the profession and an extraordinary (and growing) demand for new computerized editions of Spanish texts. The prospect of making comedia texts available in computer -readable format is at once exciting and daunting. Existing data collections and retrieval formats point out both the opportunities and the problems that may arise in undertaking such an enterprise. In addition, in undertaking the massive project of making comedia texts available in machine-readable formats, one must confront questions relating to which comedia text among many, copyrights, and administrative issues. Under the auspices of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, Inc., and funded by the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, a colloquium was held June 11 and 12, 1993, on the campus of Princeton University to discuss the future of machine-readable comedia texts. The participants were Margaret Rich Greer, Associate Professor of Spanish at Princeton; Sharon Voros, Professor of Spanish at the United States Naval Academy; Matthew D. Stroud, Professor of Spanish at Trinity University; Toby 145 146BCom, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Summer 1993) Paff, Humanities Specialist for Computer and Information Technology at Princeton; and Susan Hockey, Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Rutgers and Princeton. In one sense, we comediantes are fortunate to have a number of models available for study, from Vern Williamsen's collection of comedia texts available on floppy diskette in WordPerfect format through the AHCT, to the Dante and Shakespeare collections available on-line to subscribers of Internet, to the CD-ROM based ADMYTE project to transcribe and digitize all of the medieval texts and manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. (A description of the ADMYTE project is available in Hispania 75 [1992]: 1010-25.) All delivery formats have some advantages and disadvantages, but the most important consideration is not actually the method in which the data are distributed but the manner in which the texts are stored and treated. Especially since technology changes so rapidly, it is important from the very outset to establish standards that will be useful to future comediantes with access to machines and software not yet even invented. In other words, the goal of the project should not be a CD-ROM collection, since CD-ROM may not be with us forever and does not allow data changes once the disk has been produced. Rather, the texts encoded and the processes for studying them should be such that they can be released now in current technology and also later in "revised editions" taking advantage of both technological and scholarly advances. Early in the meetings, three starting points became quite clear. First, any project to encode comedia texts should use standard ASCII text as the basis for data storage and retrieval. Those familiar with the limitations of e-mail should not think that standard ASCII (the first 128 characters ) implies a necessary lack of ability to accent, underscore, and the like. Simple programming code sent with the texts will allow one to view text with appropriate diacritical marks without regard to the manner in which the text is stored. Second, the entire text and analysis software should be designed to be available on Internet. The advantages of Internet include worldwide accessibility to anyone with a modem and an Internet account, regardless of the type of machine or the type of software they are using. The authoritative database would reside somewhere (most likely an important Internet node), making it quite easy to supplement , update, and disseminate, unlike CD's or even floppy...