A Frost Concordance, Work of a Lifetime, Done in Two Months With Help of Computer

The two worlds of technology and the humanities, in a cooperative effort frequently recommended but rarely accomplished, have met at Dartmouth to produce in two months' time a work of literary research it would have taken a scholar a good part of a lifetime to complete.

The result is A Concordance to thePoetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem '51, College Librarian, and published last year by Holt Information Systems.

The concordance, a compilation of 100,000 words used in Frost's poetry and precise information on where, in what context, and with what frequency they were used, represents the joint effort of President Kemeny, then Professor of Mathematics, Mr. Lathem, and Richard A. Jensen '69, a mathematics major currently working on his doctorate at the University of Illinois.

The book lists the chosen words alphabetically, each line of each Frost poem in which they were used, the title of the poem, and the line number in that poem, and the page reference to The Poetry ofRobert Frost, edited by Mr. Lathem and published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1969.

The feasibility of using the facilities of the Kiewit Computation Center to produce a concordance of poetry arose casually in a luncheon-table conversation between Professor Kemeny and Mr. Lathem. Enthusiastic about the possibility, Mr. Kemeny offered the services of a mathematics assistant and volunteered to supervise the programming personally. Preliminary approaches were tested on a series of trial runs, and the words selected by Mr. Lathem were fed into the Honeywell 635 computer at Kiewit.

The complete run of the concordance was done during a 15-hour period between midnight and mid-afternoon of one day in September 1969. The trio worked steadily through the nighttime and morning hours chosen because the magnitude of the job required exclusive use of the computer. Kiewit officials report that the input represented the largest body of data ever stored in the Dartmouth computer for a single project. It would, in fact, have exceeded the machine's capacity had not Mr. Kemeny devised some special and sophisticated input procedures.

Further refinements to the original programs were added during the winter and spring, and the final production run was done at Kiewit in June 1970. The output was transferred to tape and printed at Information Services, Inc., in Wellesley, Mass.

The project, accomplished in two months from earliest trial runs through printout, compares with a similar concordance of Byron's poetry, reported to have taken 25 years of its editor's time.

In addition to the three principal workers in preparing the concordance, assistance was given by Randolph Broderson '70, then an undergraduate and now doing graduate work at the University of Oregon, and by John S. McGeachie, director of Dartmouth's Data Processing Center.