Using TACT with Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text Analysis Computing Tools by Ian Lancashire et al. (review)

HUMANITIES 137 heterodoxy which assumes difference politics must necessarily reject the ideal of impartiality. Each ofthese ideological essays offers brief illustrations to illuminate its particular thesis, but the volume moves next to four 'Instances' where postmodern theory receives more extended application. Sheila Noonan reopens the abortion debate by demonstrating how totalizing liberal feminism discounted the differing experiences of non-white, non-middleclass , non-heterosexual women. Richard F. Devlin's account of the Irish hunger strike distinguishes between the scepticism ofpostmodempolitical philosophy and deconstruction as a potentially effective tool for political empowerment. Claude Denis presents a Canadian case turning on cultural identity issues: a court awarded anAboriginal plaintiff damages for assault, battery, and false imprisonment because he had not consented to be initiated in a tribal ceremony prescribed for him by the elders of his community, with Denis offering multiple frames through which to view facts and law. And Pamela McCallum reads Alejo Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces as exemplurn of the double character of the modernist Enlightenmentshowinghow its simultaneouslyemancipatory and limiting effects were enhanced when its values were inscribed upon a colonial society with a racial hierarchy profoundly different from the hierarchies of the European society which gave rise to it. Appropriately, the meanings of this collection emerge out of the diversity ofits subject matter and itsviewpoints. Contributors are variously drawn from the academic disciplines of law, literature, sociology, political science, and philosophy; Bawnan and Hartoffer only signposts and fruitful juxtapositions. For example, Nedelsky's unresolved problem about how to provide equal choice for entering into and withdrawing from relationships is in part resolved by Norris's assessment of power which follows; similarly , Nedelsky's optimism about the potential of law to determine which differences ought to matter might be illustrated by the strategies recommended in the pieces by Devlin and Denis. But no conclusions are forced upon us. It is a reliefto the reader and a credit to Bauman and Hart that this collection subversively resists coalescence into any meta-narrative or truth claim valorizing difference as the new hegemony of unitary Significance. (ELLEN ANDERSON) Ian Lancashire in collaboration with John Bradley, Willard McCarty, Michael Stairs and T.R. Wooldridge. Using TACT with Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text Analysis Computing Tools New York: Modern Language Association of America 1995. 361, xiii, with accompanying CD-ROM. us $50.00 The first electronic text project, Father Busa's concordance to the works of 5tThomas Aquinas and related authors, began almost fifty years ago. Since 138 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 then scholars have used computers to make indexes and concordances, to study various aspects of style, to produce critical editions, and to compile dictionaries. In recent years, computers have become a regular part of the humanities scholar's working lifeboth as word processors, and, increasingly , as a means of access to the Internet for electronic mail and the World Wide Web. Yet few scholars in literary studies today make serious use of computer programs for text analysis. Not many more are aware of the possibilities, largely because there is little published material suitable for begirmers. The arrival of this long-awaited publication should help to fill this gap. TACT (Textual Analysis Computing Tools) consists of sixteen computer programs developed at the University of Toronto and intended primarily for use by literary scholars. The programs can be downloaded from the Internet and most scholars will use only the two or three programs that provide basic functions of word searches, concordances, and vocabulary distributions. The others are for more specializedor advanced applications. This book explains how to use the programs, but it is much more than a computer manual. It offers advice on editing (creating) electronic texts, including a briefbut useful discussion on the problems of optical character recognition and of electronic texts on the Internet where reliability is a serious issue. It discusses at greater lengthhow the phenomenawithin texts should be encoded so that TACT (or other software) can retrieve them easilYI and it explains, in an appendix which is definitely for the technically minded, how to deal with non-standard characters. A new TACT user must first rtm a special program to take a text file and convert...