Abstract
We have revised the mainframe EYEBALL, written in the early 1970s and used by several researchers during that decade, to run on microcomputers. This program parses English language texts and provides a statistical description of many linguistic features which are of interest to those involved in stylistics. In order to produce an analytical approach which goes beyond the simple reporting of linguistic data, we have selected a small number of features which characterize noticeable elements of the language used and we have written programs to facilitate statistical comparisons among texts. While EYEBALL is not automatic, the interactive parsing routines are elegant enough that the users spend most of their time confirming accurate guesses, rather than having to determine the structure of each phrase and clause. We hope that the program will be used by humanities scholars who have not previously been inclined to wrestle with the barriers of mainframe computing in the past.
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Donald Ross is a professor of English and Composition. With Robert Rasche he developed the mainframe version of EYEBALL in 1970 which he used for several studies of literary style. He has also worked on several projects involving computer-aided instruction in English composition. He was the inaugural Executive Secretary for the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
David Hunter is an assistant professor of computer science at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His interests include software engineering, formal specification, artificial intelligence, and the application of these methodologies to humanities computing. His forthcoming paper, “A Partitioned Rule-Based Approach to Content Analysis,” will appear in the collectionResearch in Humanities Computing 3, soon to be published by Oxford University Press.
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Ross, D., Hunter, D. μ-EYEBALL: An interactive system for producing stylistic descriptions and comparisons. Comput Hum 28, 1–11 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830682
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830682