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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
The multiplication of documentary sources (books or objects) from which the various disciplines glean their data has made the machine an indispensable tool of scholarship today.
The horizons of research are broadening continually. The traditional sciences have widened the field of their investigations. Linguistic studies, for example, are no longer limited to a few languages, but encompass all dialects which have ever been spoken or are spoken today throughout the world. Archaeology is armed with methods of prospecting undreamed of yesterday, and uses the airplane and aerial photography to locate sites. A submarine branch of archaeology, exploring the beds of the seas, has sprung up alongside of land-based archaeology. New sciences have come into being relatively recently, like demography, or even very recently, like experimental psychology. All of these sciences owe something to humanistic studies, not only the applied sciences and industry but even the pure sciences such as mathematics, methodology, heuristics, for scholars are men, integrated into groups, and their intellectual activity falls into the domain of psycho-sociology.
1 Extremely interesting information concerning the increase in documentation can be found in R. Caude and A. Moles (with several other collaborators), Méthodologie vers une science de l'action (Paris, Gauthiers-Villars, 1964), par ticularly, in the chapter "Sociologie de l'action" by H. Migeon and A. Moles, the graphs of the increase of scholars in the major parts of the world (p. 192) and of the rhythm of important inventions since the 10th century (p. 195), and in the chapter "Mise en ordre des connaissances" by J. Dubas, which has a paragraph on the "Développement de la production documentaire" illustrated with a graph (p. 276). In fields such as those which we are treating here, the term "exponential" should not be taken strictly. Explaining the characteristics of a geometric progression (p. 35) A. Moles notes, "when the curve is relatively lacking in precision, it is often difficult to judge whether it is a parabole y = Ax2 or an exponential y = ekx."
2 This is true only in the domain of science in the proper sense of the word, where progress depends solely on observation and calculation. The case is com pletely different in purely qualitative fields, such as the arts. Here it is obvious that the number of masterpieces and of great artists which have come into the world in the past 40 years is miniscule in comparison with all that the past has produced.
3 In the work cited above (note 1), H. Migeon and A. Moles illustrate (p. 193) "the dangers of forecasting" by presenting the curve of the number of workers in the electrical construction industry in England, with this reflection : "It is obvious here that it would be dangerous to go too far in extrapolating an exponential curve; the absurd result would be that in 1990 the entire British labor force would be engaged in electrical construction, while it is now evident that the influence of automation will brake this curve by bringing about an employment saturation." It is highly significant that the curves which the same authors offer to represent the growth of the scholarly population in the world (p. 192) have all begun to lean towards the horizontal (except that of China, which is too recent): "the tendency towards saturation is already becoming evident."
4 Cf. J.-C. Gardin, "Problems of Documentation," in Diogenes, No. 11, Fall 1955, pp. 107-124.
5 The reflections which follow, and a good number of those included in this article, draw particularly on a lecture given by Mr. J.-C. Gardin on March 18, 1965 at the center of the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale (44, rue de Rennes, Paris) and on a conversation which he was good enough to grant me a few days later. I thank him for his kindness and hope that I have not distorted his ideas here.
6 The electronic machine is the fruit of a sort of collaboration among England, the United States and France. Its true distant ancestor is not the calculating machine devised by Schickard (1624), Pascal (1645) or Leibniz (around 1700), which is more in the line of office machines, but rather the Analytical Engine designed by the Englishman Charles Babbage around 1830. Conceived ahead of its time, this apparatus was never constructed because the idea was too advanced for the technical means which industry then had at its disposal. Babbage's idea was revived in 1937 in the United States by Howard H. Aiken, who had the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) construct an electronic machine called the "Mark I." The idea of a machine powered by electronic resources was expounded in 1938 by the French professor Louis Couffignal. Aiken's second machine, the "Mark II," was electromagnetic and was out dated even before it was produced by the E.N.I.A.C. (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first truely electronic machine, built by J.P. Eckert and J.W. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania around 1944. England followed close on the heels of the United States; a project was under examination in 1946 and the machine constructed in 1951. In France, the Compagnie Bull built machines based on the ideas of Professor Couffignal. On the history of electronic machines, particularly in the United States, see: El. Berkeley, Giant Brains, or Machines that Think On the principle and operations of the electronic machine, see, for example: N. Chapin, An Introduction to Automatic Computers (New York, Van Nostrand, 1953), and in the "Que sais-je?" collection (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France): J. and J. Poyen, Le langage électronique (1960); P. Demarne and M. Rouquerol, Les ordinateurs électroniques (1959); B. Renard, Le calcul électronique (1960). The best description of the various forms of the modern electronic machine is the work of François Gauchet, Roger Lambert and Jacques Violet, Le calcul automatique en psychologie (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1965, in the Collection "Le Psychologue," No. 22). The text is illustrated by some thirty diagrams, 15 photographs and 10 tables; the last part offers a concrete example of the use of automatic calculations in psychology. The authors have succeeded in giving explanations which are both extremely detailed and yet understandable to the non-specialist.
7 In the field of philology, a good number of projects remarkable for their breadth and precision are carried out with the aid of the mechanical machine as well as the electronic computor. This is the case particularly at the Laboratoire d'Analyse statistique des Langues anciennes (University of Liège), directed by Mr. Delatte and Mr. Evrard, who describe their work in an article in Antiquité Classique, vol. XXX (1961), fasc. 2, pp. 427-442. Procedures where mechanical machines play an important role have recently been adopted by Mr. Paul Tombeur to study the language and style of the medieval chronicler Raoul de Saint-Trond. He explains his methods in an article entitled, "Application des méthodes mé canographiques à un auteur medieval" (in Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, vol. 34, 1964, pp. 125-160. His work will be published in the near future under the patronage of the Commission Royale d'Histoire de la Belgique.
8 Concerning automatic documentation we will cite only J.-C Gardin, "Etat et tendances actuels de la documentation automatique," in the review La Traduction automatique (Paris, 5th year, No. 1, March, 1964). In his notes the author gives a considerable bibliography concerning work achieved in the United States and in France.
9 The continuity of what is known as problems of "classification," from traditional documentation to modern documentation, is set forth by B.C. Vickerey, Classification and Indexing in Science (London, 1959), and by de Grolier, Etude sur les catégories générales applicables aux classifications et codifications (Paris, 1962).
10 Here is an example, not very recent but significant nonetheless, of the obstacles to the progress of science which the scarcity of translators creates. In the Histoire générale des Sciences published under the direction of R. Taton (Presses Universitaires de France) vol. 2, in the chapter concerning the "Naissance de la chimie moderne," Mr. Daumas adds the following footnote (p. 553) to his discussion of Lavoisier's work around 1770: "Much before that period the Russian scientist M.A. Lomonossov published work which included remarkable anticipations of later discoveries, among them the conceptions of the atomic constitution of bodies and of kinetic energy due to molecular agitation… Unfortu nately his writings, published in Russian, never came to the attention of chemists from other countries. There is no mention of them in the English, French and German literature of the time. A broad diffusion of his ideas would undoubtedly have promoted the future of modern chemistry."
11 In the United States there are at least ten centers dedicated to automatic translation, notably at Harvard, Georgetown, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and an Association for Machine Translation and Computional Linguistics. In England, Birckbeck College (Department of Numerical Automation) and Cambridge (Cam bridge Language Research Unit) can be cited. In Russia the most important body seems to be the Experimental Laboratory of Automatic Translation at the University of Leningrad. In France there is a "Centre d'Etudes de la Traduction Automatique" at Paris and another at Grenoble; the Association pour l'Etude et le développement de la Traduction Automatique (A.T.A.L.A.), 20, rue de la Baume in Paris, publishes a review, La Traduction Automatique, which is international in its coverage.
Concerning the history and the technique of translation by machine, the best overall discussions are: Emile Delavenay, La Machine à traduire, (Collection "Que sais-je?," Presses Universitaires de France, 1959) and A.G. Œttinger, Automatic Language Translation: Lexical and Technical Aspects (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960). For details on recent research, above all in the United States, but also in England, France, Italy and Japan, consult the communications presented at the First International Conference on Automatic Language Translation and Linguistic Analysis, held at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington (Middlesex), from September 5 to 8, 1961. The reports and discussions have been published in English by Her Majesty's Stationary Office (London, 1962). The fourteen most important communications, among the thirty-six presented at this international conference, have been translated into French and published under the title: Traduction automatique et Linguistique appliquée (Paris, Presses Uni versitaires de France, 1964). This volume is the first in a collection which will appear under the auspices of the A.T.A.L.A.
12 A detailed description of this experiment has been published in the Bulletin d'information de l'Institut de Recherche de d'Histoire des Textes directed by Mr. Glénisson (Paris, 15, quai Anatole France; CNRS) vol. 13 (1965); Dom Jacques Froger, "La collation des manuscrits à la machine électronique." The program of comparison is the work of Mme Renaud.
13 Mr. Gardin describes his work in an article, "Cartes perforées et ordinateurs au service de l'archéologie." (Review La Nature, Nov., 1962, pp. 449-457).
14 This experiment was described at the Colloque International de Lexico graphie held at Besançon in June, 1961, with a demonstration on a Bull machine at the Faculty of Letters of Strasbourg. Concerning the method followed "by hand" see: Dom Jacques Froger, "La critique textuelle et la méthode des groupes fautifs" (Report presented at Besançon), in the Cahiers de Lexicologie, No. 3, 1962, published by the Faculty of Letters and Humanistic Studies of Besançon (Dr. M. Quémada). The program designed for the machine is the work of Mr. Philippe Poré. It was explained by Mme Poyen and Mr. Poré at the second Congress of the A.F.C.A.L.T.I., in October, 1961. For an overall idea of the question, the following work could be consulted: Dom Jacques Froger and Philippe Poré, La critique des textes et son automatisation (Paris, Dunod, to appear in 1966, in the Collection "Initiation").
15 Concerning the methods and results of censuses and public opinion polls, see the Handbook of Population Census Methods (3 pamphlets), published by the Bureau of Statistics of the U.N.
16 This laboratory, directed by Mr. Robert Pagès, holds a cumulative directory of its members' publications at the disposition of researchers (latest edition: 1965). It includes a good number of works dealing with mathematical methods and the use of computors.
17 Mr. Jacques Ellul, in his book Propagandes (Paris, A. Colin, 1962), takes a highly sceptical attitude concerning the validity of mathematical methods in psycho-sociology, and goes so far as to denounce them rather categorically in a paragraph devoted to the ineffectiveness of methods designed to measure the success of a propaganda campaign (Annex I, pp. 294-295 particularly). He notes (p. 286, note 2) that certain American authors contest the premises of public opinion polls, for example Blumer, "Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling," in the American Sociological Review, 1948. On the question as a whole, see: Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences, Henry Regnery and Co., Chicago, 1956.
18 This example is borrowed from Philippe Mouchez, Démographie (Collection "Thémis", Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), p. 134, note 1.
19 Details concerning the services which the electronic machine can render in philology can be found in: Dom Jacques Froger, "Emploi de la machine électro nique dans les études médiévales," in the Bulletin de la Société Internationale pour l'étude de la philosophie médiévale (Louvain), vol. 3 (1961, pp. 177-188. See also the works cited above, note 6.
20 Cf. P. Guiraud, Problèmes et méthodes de la statistique linguistique (Paris, 1960).
21 Cf. G.U. Yule, The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary (Cambridge, 1944) concerning the author of the Imitation of Christ; G. Herdan, "Chaucer's Authorship of the Planetis," in Language, 32, 1956, p. 254-259; Rev. K. Graystone and G. Herdan, "The Authorship of the Pastorals in the Light of Statistical Lin guistics," in New Testament Studies, 6, 1959, pp. 1-15.
22 The review Science et Vie, No. 572, vol. CVII, May, 1965, contains an item which hides a serious warning behind an amusing facade: "In 1963 a theologian, Father Morton, demonstrated, on the basis of a semantic analysis carried out by an electronic computor, that the fourteen epistles of St. Paul could not all have been written by the same person, and that six different authors were involved. Applying the same analytical methodology to the works published by Father Morton himself, another clergyman, Father Ellison, proved that they could not all have been composed by the author. The electronic brain had ‘demonstrated' that, logically speaking, Father Morton did not exist."
23 Mr. de Possel is currently studying a machine to recite texts as well. This project could be useful in various ways, particularly to the blind and would complement the automatic reader.
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