The very pulse of the machine: Three trends toward improvement in electronic versions of humanities texts

Since April 1989, the Center for Text and Technology at Georgetown University has gathered information on the structure of projects that produce electronic text in the humanities. This report — based on the April, 1991 version of the Georgetown Catalogue and emphasizing its full-text projects in humanities disciplines other than linguistics —surveys the countries in which projects are found, the languages encoded, the disciplines served, and the auspices represented. Then the report explores three trends toward the improvement of electronic texts: increased scope of the new projects, improved quality of the editions used, and greater sophistication in the text-analysis tools added. Included among the notes is a list of titles and contacts for 42 projects cited in the report.