Subject: making a concordance: some answers
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sun Mar 26 2000 - 07:49:54 EST
I checked with a handful of academic people I know about making
concordances of the work of living writers, and I checked with one
intellectual-property attorney, in an attempt to see whether our
flight of fancy had any basis in reality.
The academics, I am surprised to say, were complete strikeouts. None
of them had ever done concordances or were much interested in them.
I guess I don't know the right kind of scholars.
The intellectual-property (IP) attorney was much more helpful. She
said that at a minimum, the litigious author (hmmmmm, is our author
litigious?) could tie you up in court with at least slight
plausibility, on the grounds that a concordance is merely an
extraction and rearrangement of his words. In the long run, if one
had the money to challenge it, one might win, but there's no
guarantee of that, even if it's for scholarly use without expectation
of financial gain. Part of IP infringement is a question of whether
the work at hand (in our example, a concordance) is derivative of the
original work. Again, yes, it's derivative, but in a good academic
tradition. However, she said, you'd want to be someone with "deep
pockets" before trying such a thing, especially with a litigious
writer.
On the other hand, the argument that publishing a concordance would
reduce the writer's ability to earn money from his work would be hard
to press, given that (a) his works are already in print and selling
strongly, and (b) he is probably not going to create a concordance of
his own work.
So, it doesn't sound very promising. I guess we will have to await
another indeterminate number of days before we see anything like that
kind of textual analysis of JDS's work. It's a pity, too, because it
might allow cross-tabulation of words and phrases to see how the
stories relate to one another. I've seen some intriguing work done
with a body of work and an electronic concordance; one fellow I know
in Amsterdam did some riveting studies of French literature using
such tools.
--tim o'connor
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