I would expect a book entitled Information technology in the humanities: tools, techniques, and applications to have expert information from that most-difficult-to-find hybrid, the computer-literate humanities scholar. I read the chapter Literature with great interest. Are the authors of this chapter humanities instructors with a good understanding of computing or computer specialists with a strong secondary background in academic literature studies?
Alas, my faith in their understanding of current computer education practice was shaken in the second paragraph where they naively question the resource capability of academic computing mainframes if all literature students were to log in. Perhaps they do not realize that Computing Center services in all universities have been successfully tackling the growth in undergraduate computing needs for the last 20 years.
The main subject of the chapter is computer-aided learning (CAL) techniques used in English literature departments. A two-stage strategy for future developments is proposed. Unfortunately, some of the proposals are already practiced by other departments. Limitations on computer applications in the study of literature are also discussed. There are some sensible caveats about the time scale and work required to write good CAL packages. These contrast unfavorably with the speculation concerning expert systems and CAL later in the work.
Some of the topics addressed, for example, linguistics, could either have been more thoroughly tackled or even given a separate chapter. Another slightly annoying feature was the lack of examples. Each subsection had one and only one example of software or research. This does not allow the reader enough references for further study.
Since the authors regard literature studies as one of the most difficult of CAL applications, why were the following topics not tackled instead?
(1) General aids for any student: word processing, spelling checkers, bibliographic tools, and the online searching facilities of library databases.
(2) Specific topics for literature students, for example, stylometry.
(3) Educational aids for English students, for example, adventure-game aids for creative writing.
I was disappointed by this paper. The authors do not prove that they have a basic knowledge of other work in the field, let alone information technology or computing. There are some interesting details about literature and computer-aided learning, but these are not supported by enough information on relevant work in the field. If the intended audience is composed of teachers, then some of the information might be helpful; but as a reflection of current practices and for the more academic reader, I fear that such superficiality is of less use.
