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Re: pollution & the vulgate

   Date: 	Wed, 5 Jan 1994 14:14:13 -0700
   From: "Sterling G. Bjorndahl" <bjorndahl@augustana.ab.ca>
   X-Vms-Mail-To: UU%"nt-greek@virginia.edu"

   Michael Bushnell writes:

   > Absolutely.  I'm not an academic in the humanities.  But the attitude
   > here that the only use of the Vulgate must be an academic one is in
   > error.  There are many uses; the current CCAT distribution channel
   > leaves out many non-academic uses.

   How does it leave them out?  You're not being prevented from having the
   text, you're just being asked to register.  I fail to see the evil in
   this.

The distribution channel is very expensive for me.  I can get a large
number of on-line books via FTP; it is not necessary for me to store
them on a local disk, because the FTP servers have advertised
themselves as willing to accept traffic.  That means that when I want
to look at, say, King Lear, I just connect to one of them (say
ftp.uu.net) and get the text.  When I'm done, I delete it.

This ease of convenient use cannot happen with the large number of
texts that CCAT has but cannot or will not release in a similar
fashion.  

   Unless Act IV of King Lear held a dozen other exceptions.  Like it or
   not, by doing such statistical work you are engaging in academic
   humanities research.  If you can't trust your sample, your results are
   suspect.  OK, so you have no intention of publishing your results, but
   if someone else, in ignorance, did so, their career could be affected. 
   And academics should not have to be saddled with "checksums."  If a text
   is labelled "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" Act IV of King Lear
   should be in there.

I don't understand.  Academics should not be saddled with "checksums"
(a matter of typing a command that takes about a second to execute),
but they should be saddled with sending in paperwork?  I think the
cost of verifying a checksum is massively smaller that the cost of
sending in paperwork.

And, keep in mind that CCAT's restrictions don't do anything to
restrict the possibility of inaccurate texts.  Not *anything*.

	-mib
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