NorthAmericanTexasHistory

An overdue thank-you note to a host of distant comrades (see WorldTexasHistory), Canadian and US correspondents were prolific:

• Canada: Bob Fillmore (Ottawa) ported it to the Commodore Amiga computer. Ronald Collins (Toronto) suggested applications to legal research and proposed many important new features. David Graham (St. John's, Newfoundland) found some important bugs and used the program to build frequency-count lists of vocabularies. Françoise Lapointe (Quebec) tried it for text and discourse analysis in his doctoral studies in business administration. François Blanchard (Montréal) used it in French to search patterns in interviews conducted about drug development regulations in Canada. Dana J. Vanier (Ottawa) of the National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction worked on research tools for the National Building Code of Canada. Pierre Mackay (Montréal) in the Informatics and Law Research Centre of the Université du Québec ' Montréal called for work on handling accented characters properly; he sought to apply it to texts such as the Canadian Constitutional Acts (1763-1985). Alan James (Vancouver) used it to index his personal photographic records and to help edit a long workbook on writing/communications. Daniel Campbell (Halifax) used it on legal documents. Edouard Beniak (Toronto) of the Institut d'études pédagogiques de l'Ontario, Centre for Franco-Ontarian Studies, used it in his work as a sociologist on French interview transcripts. Marshall Gilliland (Saskatoon) of the University of Saskatchewan's English Deptartment, Karin Flikeid (? Filkeid ? --- it's hard to read her signature) (Halifax) of Saint Mary's University, and Brian Woodward (Calgary) sent excellent notes.
• United States: There are so many kind letters from US addresses that it's hard to know where to begin. Dividing the users thematically:
  • linguists: Armin Schwegler (California) in the UC Irvine Department of Spanish and Portuguese used it on Palenquero linguistic data; he also prodded, pushed, blackmailed, and bribed me to extend the software to handle non-Latin alphabets more gracefully. Philip Payne (Washington) of Linguist's Software was an enthusiast who built upon it to make a commercial multilingual search engine for his customers. John Robertson (Utah) of the Department of Linguistics, Brigham Young University, worked on the analysis of Mayan languages using it. Raymond Harder (California) rewrote it to work with Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek versions of the Bible and other ancient texts. Louis Janus (Minnesota) of the Norwegian Department, St. Olaf College, built key-word-in-context listings of Norwegian word usage. Stephan Schuetze-Coburn (California) built concordances for his dissertation in linguistics. David K. Wyatt (New York) asked for modifications to handle non-Latin alphabets, particularly Thai and Southeast Asian languages that do not divide words. Matthew Allen (Connecticut) analyzed Tamil language songs for his Ph.D. work. William S. Turley (Illinois), A. Elgin Heinz (California), and Peter Hendriks (Connecticut) all heard of it via the Asian Studies Newsletter and sought to use it in their varied analyses of Chinese and other Asian literature.
  • scholars: Oswald Werner (Illinois) of the Anthropology Department, Northwestern University, used it to search diaries and interviews for ethnographic analysis; we exchanged many excellent letters over the years. Richard Parres (Michigan) did bibliographic research as part of his classes at Wayne State University. Charles Beauchamp (South Dakota) of the USD School of Medicine applied it to medical reference texts. Charles Reilly (Maryland) used it for content analysis of texts at the University of Maryland. Donald Stone Sade (Illinois), at Northwestern University, aimed it at his transcribed descriptive field notes (collected over a period of 17 years) on the behavior of rhesus monkeys. Bruce Hymon (Ohio) indexed medical abstracts. George Crabb (California) analyzed Sherlock Holmes stories. Steve Waldhalm (Mississippi) in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University used it in his research and teaching. Ed Ryan (Virginia) and his daughter Patty used it to index school papers. M. C. Morgan (Minnesota) of the Bemidji State University Writing Center used it in his teaching. David Brooks (Massachusetts) used it for work on his Ph.D. thesis in history. Michael R. Boudreau (Illinois) at the University of Illinois, English Department, sent a kind letter. Ronald Smith (Illinois) in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois used it in his studies. Daniel Collison (Michigan) used it in medical education. Richard Boulanger (Massachusetts) of the Berklee College of Music experimented with it, as did David Jodrey, Jr. (Virginia) in the Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, Department of Psychology. Bill Hailey (Texas) used it for Biblical studies. Peter R. Webster (Illinois), Northwestern University's School of Music tried it. Michael Stephanides (California) used it to organize lecture notes from a Stanford medical school pathology course. Richard B. Martin (Virginia) applied it in his work on Tibetan materials. (He also gave my wife and children a wonderful hoard of world postage stamps for their collections.)
  • software developers: Sam Thornton (Nebraska) extended the system to include structured (source/section/chapter/paragraph) information. Doug Clapp (Minnesota) experimented with extensions of it for gisting and abstracting articles. Doug Bell (Florida) aimed it at UNIX system technical manuals and other documentation files. Andrew Stone (New Mexico) suggested some good improvements in the code. John Chapor (California) told me about the structured thesaurus (controlled-vocabulary) database tools he has developed.
  • engineers & scientists: Dwight Brown (Georgia) applied it to asbestos regulation tracking. David Eike (Virginia) used it on military documentation. Tom Stewart (Texas) used it to sift through requirements documents for NASA's Space Station. Guy Boy (California) at the NASA/Ames Research Center played with it in his AI work. Richard Patrican (Pennsylvania) tried it in his work on large documents in space technology.
  • lawyers: Scott R. Miller (New Jersey) applied it as a litigation support tool in his law office. Fred Barth (Pennsylvania) used it to simplify searches through laws, statutes, and rules of civil and criminal courts. Jay Stephens (Illinois) at the University of Illinois tried it to help develop an integrated law practice system. Michael B. Wilmar (California) used it for his legal research.
  • famous & semi-famous: Cliff Stoll (California, author of The Cuckoo's Egg) used FreeText to help him build the index at the back of his first book. Michael Hart (Illinois, Project Gutenberg), at Common Knowledge used it on free text collections. Raymond Lau (Stuffit) wrote with great encouragement and good humor.
  • publishers: Joanne Bealy (of Broderbund Software, California) used it to index the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog. John Trotter (Maryland & California) built indices to CD-ROM products with it for the nuclear power industry. The Nautilus CD-ROM information service for the Macintosh helped share it. Gary Boone (Colorado) of Micro Methods used it to create an index to search big CD-ROM patent databases. David C. Humphrey (Illinois) used it with the Sherlock Holmes Companion. John A. Geletej (New Jersey) built upon it for products developed by his company, Multi Solutions, Inc.
  • simply nice people: Julian Miller (New York) teased me good-naturedly about changing the name of my IR programs too often. I received kind letters from Carney Mimms (New York), Nopphdol Eakabuse (Pennsylvania), Bill Wieties (Missouri), Russ Clark (New York), Madeline Yeh (Virginia), R. C. Bahn (Minnesota), Mark Schorr (Massachusetts), B. Thomas Florence (District of Columbia), Paul A. Carnahan (Massachusetts), Loren Hoy (Washington), Micah Altman (California), Steve McGuirk (Indiana, of the MAC-SIG, Apple Picker club), Kevin Barry (New Jersey), Gordon T. Smith (Pennsylvania), David Nowak (California), Jim Croft (Washington), Kelly Goodside (California), Don Payne (New Jersey), Frederick Lee (Hawaii), David Grimes (Pennsylvania), Rosanne Gorczynski (Wisconsin), George Desrochers (Massachusetts), Scott Anderson (Virginia, who sent an entertaining letter about his hypertextual fantasies), John Hendricks (Kentucky), Corinne Boisseau (South Carolina), Joan Winsor (Minnesota), Robin Cowan (New York), Brad Doster (California, who told of archiving and retrieving his email correspondence), Ken Rentiers (Texas), Peter Cleaveland (Pennsylvania, who told of using it to wade through masses of downloaded text), Michael Steinore (Arizona), David B. Williams (Illinois), Laura E. Brauer (Pennsylvania), and David M. Ng (California).

As in WorldTexasHistory: belated thanks to you all!

Monday, May 15, 2000 at 07:47:37 (EDT) = 2000-05-15

TopicProgramming - TopicPersonalHistory

(correlates: RichardMartin, ProudSignage, SmallIdeas, ...)