In 1983, I decided to set up an inexpensive portable computer in the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal. I chose the Osborne Executive, just weeks before that company slid into bankruptcy. Nonetheless, I am very happy with the machine. [Osborne is out of bankruptcy now and the Executive, at about $900, is an excellent choice. Eds.]
The first problem with setting up a machine in Nepal was simply getting it there. That is a long story which I will write about later. For now, suffice to say never let go of the handle!
Once I arrived in Katmandu, operating the computer safely was my main concern. Nepal has problems delivering reliable electricity. It was often off for hours or days at a time, and frequently surged and sagged to an alarming degree--up to 400 volts or down to 40! We knew when it was low. The lights would dim to nothing. And when it was high the transformer would begin to 'sing'. There was no way that I would hook up my computer directly to incoming power source. At the time, there was no battery pack system that would operate for more than a few hours without recharging, and I wasn't sure I wanted to hook it up directly either.
My first purchase was a VOLTAGE STABILIZER-TRANSFORMER. Be sure you buy one that is large enough to accommodate both the computer and the printer, and any other appliances (radio, coffee pot, etc.) that you need in the house. I find the Japanese brand STAVOL to be reliable. They cost up to several hundred dollars.
The incoming 220 volt line goes into the stabilizer, which can be set to deliver the 110 volts AC that the computer needs. Some computers can be set to run on 220 volts, though, so the step-down function is not needed. The computer can be run direc tly off the stabilizer, but most stabilizers cannot handle line surges over a certain percentage. My STAVOL was rated at 30%. A good electrician can modify the standard stabilizer so that it will cut out completely for bigger surges. If you try this, save your work frequently.
I Took a more conservative approach. From the stabilizer I ran the 110v line to an AUTOMATIC BATTERY CHARGER (from Sears, Wards, auto parts, or similar stores) and then to a battery. A 10 amp charger worked for me, but a 12 amp would have been better. The 'automatic' feature allows you to keep the charger ON at all times without overcharging or damaging the battery.
I used a heavy duty truck BATTERY (120 amp-hour). Mine was made in Japan, and purchased in Nepal. I never had any trouble with the battery.
The battery generates 12 volts DC, which I hooked up to the next device, a POWER INVERTER, which converted 12 volts to clean, steady, 110 volts AC, which is what most computers need. Inverters vary in capacity, so be sure to get one that is sufficient for the wattage and amperage of your computer and all the peripherals.
Finally, you plug the computer into the inverter. Say a quiet mantra for good luck, and flip the inverter power switch. Things start to buzz, you turn on the computer--Presto!--it works. The system functioned without a hitch for a year. Even when the power was out, I could work for about eight hours from the charge stored in the battery.
The only problem I had was overheating. On hot days, the temperature in the house soared to over 100 degrees. I bought a small fan and positioned it to continuously sweep over the electrical equipment under my desk. If you can, buy an internal fan for your computer, too. Of course, you should take along a supply of spare fuses, some heavy duty extension cords, three- hole sockets and adapters, and a half-dozen large alligator clips. [Your local dealer might be willing to set up a repair kit for you, with a few disk pads, and so on. Eds.]
One final word about the printer. My printer drew more current than the battery charger could handle for very long, so I usually connected it directly to the stabilizer, by-passing the charger, battery, and power inverter. This worked fine, since losing a page of print during a power surge never mattered very much. In emergencies, I could hook the printer to the inverter, but only for a few pages.
If you have any questions, write and ask me.
Department of Anthropology University of South Florida
[Courseware? That's means a computer program especially written to be used in a course. We hope the linguists are paying attention to these new words. Jerry Smith writes us about several programs that he uses in his courses. Listings are available from Smith, or from Dwight Read's anthropology program library (Department of Anthropology, UCLA). Eds.]
LEXISTAT: This is a simulation of historical linguistic analysis that relies heavily on Sarah Gudschinsky's "The ABCs of Lexicostatistics" in Language in Culture and Society, Dell Hymes, ed., Harper & Row, 1964. The program generates 100-word basic vocabulary lists for a "proto-language" for three related "languages". Then, students work on the screen or with printouts to count cognates and try to calculate patterns of linguistic divergence.
KINTYPER: The program is based on Floyd Lounsbury's "A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha- type Kinship Terminologies", in Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, W. Goodenough, ed., 1964. It uses the Romney notation (see "Cognitive aspects of English kin terms" in Amer. Anthropologist, 1964. For a kin relationship chosen from the screen, the student applies merging, half-sibling, and skewing rules (from one of the eight systems described by Lounsbury) to try to determine the appropriate kin term. The program seems to be an excellent introduction to the concepts of formal semantic analysis and emic/etic distinctions.
NEIGHBOR: This is an expanded version of a program developed by Moody and Detlefsen, "Simulating neighborhood segregation", from Byte 7#7, 1982. Students set up neighborhoods populated by a mix of two "kinds" of people, and for each group establish a level of tolerance for neighbors of the other type. Based on the Schelling's model the program then simulates long term change, as household "redistribute" themselves until equilibrium is attained. Students are expected to predict the next cycle as well as the final state of equilibrium, which under the most highly intolerant conditions may involve strips of houses where neither type is willing to live.
Department of Anthropology U. Pittsburgh
Here is the odd statistic of the day: There are 100,000 farmers in Iowa. You may rightly wonder what this has to do with Computer-Assisted Anthropology. It has to do with "marketing" computer programs. If you can think of a computer program that every farmer in Iowa needs, then you will sell a lot of copies, and still have Nebraska, Kansas, and Illinois left for the future.
Now, what if you have a program that every Anthropologist needs? Well, if you could sell them all a copy, you might make a dollar or two, but you are not likely to get rich. Furthermore, you might get buried by technical support, advertising, deve loping and publishing decent manuals, and answering phone calls at two AM from users that won't read the manual.
One possible solution to at least some of these problems is to give your program away instead of trying to sell it. This is the basic idea behind most "public domain" software. Computer clubs and user groups collect programs of all types, copy them onto common disk formats (Kaypro, Osborne, etc.) and them distribute them at cost. Many of these programs make their way onto CompuServe, INTERNET, or amateur CBBS, from which they can be retrieved for the price of a phone call (not always cheap). THIS IS A GREAT WAY TO RELEASE A PRODUCT!
Here is what happens. Avid computer users, many with special expertise of some sort, see a description of your program. They hunt down a copy, try it out, and then (a) they don't like it, (b) they don't like it, and write you a letter explaining why, (c) they like it, and tell their friends about it, (d) they love it, and soon a review appears in one of the national magazines, (e) they modify it to run on a different machine, and send you a copy, (f) they modify it, and send you a copy of the modification, (g) they write their own version, ad become your competitors, (h) some of the above.
The only bad result is (a), and if nobody likes it for free, nobody would pay for it either, so (a) is good too. The rest are good, even (g). Competition is good for the market, and the existence of competitors reassures the unwashed about the useful ness of the product. Where else can you get so many dedicated and sincere critics, but in the public domain?
Ah! But you want to make money. Well, if you can't get people interested in a free program, you aren't going to sell many. If your program is targeted at an audience as small as Anthropology (or even Social Science or Humanities), then you are never going to sell enough to support it the way SuperCalc or Lotus 1-2-3 are supported. But if the program takes off in the public domain, then before you know it you are going to be ready with version 2.
Version 2 will be great, all the bugs will be ironed out, it will have all the features that everyone has been screaming for, and there will already be a large group of users (of version 1) just dying to buy version 2. Anyway, that is what I think.
There are some neat twists in the public domain software world. Basically, they represent a step halfway between pure public domain and commercial software. For example, suppose you add a prominent statement to the documentation like this one:
This software is free. If you find it to be useful, and wish to
support continued development of this and similar programs, send
$10 to
Lee Douglas Sailer
5515 Jackson St.
Pittsburgh PA 15206
See? Just like Public Radio. There are many possible variations. The most successful is one used by a popular word processor on the IBM-PC. For free, you get the program, some utilities, some documentation, and are encouraged (!) to give copies away. For $75 dollars, you can "register" your copy, which means (1) you get a professionally printed detailed manual that describes advanced features, (2) you receive notice of improved versions in the future, and (3) if anyone who obtains their copy of PC-Write from you ever decides to register in the future, you get $25.
I fear that the mercenary nature of the computer market is obscuring the fact that Anthropology is an intellectual endeavor. Imagine an ad in the American Anthropologist that says:
Our expedition to the Amazon has discovered a hitherto unknown
group of people, belonging to a unique language group, and
practicing unique forms of exchange and marriage. For a map
showing the location of this anthropological treasure send $150
to
ANTHROBUCKS
1999 Humanities Way
Kroeberville CA
We don't normally sell our ideas, because the goal is to
advance knowledge. If we sell computer tools for doing
anthropology, we are divorcing ourselves from the intellectual
tradition.
Dept. of Anthropology Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois
In the first issue of CAAN, a letter of mine was published under the title "Apples and Archaeology." Following the note, however, there was an editorial comment which began with the words, "Hardware does matter." While I would not disagree with that statement in general, the conclusion drawn there is incorrect and reveals a small degree of Z80 and 8080 chauvinism. The issue to which I referred at some length in my comment on the Apple and the slow speed of some word processors on it has to be placed in context. I type at a speed well above 50 words per minute, and in bursts, much, much higher. At those speeds it is simply not true that there is not "any problems with word processing using WordStar on the Osborne, Kaypro-II, or IBM-PC." as suggested, unless you are a slower typist. I have used WordStar on the Osborne and the IBM and it is not the slowest program around, but it is certainly prone to lag on word-wrap and on general text entry I find that it is not difficult to get ahead of the screen display. Where there are buffers that keep you from loosing text, such a situation is not acceptable for composition on the machine while one is looking at the screen, as opposed to staring at the keyboard or writtenout text.
As to the general capability of 6502-based microcomputers, the comment published was written some time ago, and I have had considerable experience with other machines since that time. I have a Z80 card for the Apple II+ and am well-acquainted with a number of standard CP/M programs. While such systems as the Kaypro and similar Z80-based machines represent a tremendous buy in terms of dollar value, they and the Apple II line share common problems of limitations of all 8-bit chips in terms of memory. There are ardent aficionados for both the 6800 family (to which the 6502 is related) and the 8080 family (of which the Z80 is a member). These differences will matter little to the end user unless he or she intends to get into assembly language programming. Even then, the arguments for or against the various families are not conclusive and it all comes down to a matter of taste. Aside from memory limitations, however, the Apple II or a Kaypro will give good, solid value, particularly if their major use is word processing. Well-written (usually machine code) programs are available both for the Apple and CP/M 80 systems. My note was meant to caution people about word processors written in higher level languages and programs specifically like WordStar that can often be very slow, especially when there is lots of disk access.
In terms of statistical analysis, at the time I wrote the note in question there were no dependable micro statistical packages available for the IBM at all, and very few for CP/M 80 or the Apple II+. A package like VisiTrend produced, shall we say, very peculiar results under certain circumstances. -- The program was written by the author of the IBM program Lotus 1-2-3, which I hope is more accurate than its 8-bit predecessor. -- I am sure that the readers of the newsletter are not overawed by the accuracy of even major mainframe statistical packages. I heartily recommend the article "Statistical Programs for Microcomputers" (Lachenbruch 1983), and I suggest that the user of any package submit it to the tests given in that article. We have been using a new DAISY 2.0 (from Rainbow Computing) for the Apple II and have found it to be superb in terms of its accuracy and speed. Now, if only we had more memory! Obviously, the main drawback of any 8-bit system will remain the limitations on directly accessible memory, a real drawback in dealing with large data sets. Even on a 64K Apple II+, however, DAISY 2.0 will accept data up to 10 x 400. On an Apple IIe with 128K, the data table can be 10 x 830 or equivalent. In practice, this has proved surprisingly adequate. DAISY reads DIF files and data can be transferred from VisiCalc or similar programs that run on the Apple. Purchasers of packages like SPSS for the IBM-PC should be very cautious and realize they may not be getting the full power of the mainframe packages. I have reports that IBM-PC SPSS does not do common statistical procedures
Should anthropologists buy an 8-bit machine? Well maybe. The amount of software, and I think software matters more than hardware, is enormous; and the amount of support in most campus communities for these machines is great. The so-called 16 bit 8088-based computers are much more expensive, but the Sanyo is in the same price range as the 8-bit machines. The novice user will probably be happy with it, but reports and reviews generally seem to indicate that it is little, if any, faster in its operation than the 8-bit machines with which it competes in price. True 16- bit machines like the IBM-AT are much faster than the 8088 machines, but will cost very much more by the time the various components needed to make them work are added. Graphics capabilities are generally very expensive on the 8088 machines, with the exception of the PC-Jr.
Also since the letter was written, we have got an Apple Macintosh. The graphics capabilities of this machine are, as they seem to say in California, awesome. In work with the prehistoric art of the Mudglyph Cave in Tennessee (Muller in press), I found this machine's capabilities to manipulate graphic materials speeded up analysis of art forms by a factor of many times. In addition, the Mac is a tue 16-bit machine (a so-called "32-bit" machine in the sense that the 8088 is a "16-bit") and is capable of addressing staggering amounts of memory directly. At the moment, however the limit is at 512K, and anyone who intends to use the Mac for serious scientific use will need this amount of memory sooner or later, and I recommend it as the starting purchase level. The Lisa machine has more memory, but actually runs slower than the Mac. We are seeing lots of good, working software for this machine in our local user group, including data base managers that allow combination of visual data such as maps with other kinds of data (e.g. Filevision). Direct image to screen digitizers are coming in at around $200.
Lachenbruch, Peter A. 1983 Statistical Programs for Microcomputers. Byte 8(12):560-570.
Muller, Jon in press Serpents and Dancers: Art of the Mud Glyph Cave. In The Mud Glyph Cave. C. Faulkner, ed. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Dept. of Soc. and Anth. Oakland University Rochester, Mich. 48063
My comments on the Apple word processors were based on Muller's earlier negative evaluations (CAAN 1(1):7-8). We thank him for this current update.
Note that the 6500 family of CPUs is different from the 6800 family. They use different instructions and register banks and were developed by different manufacturers. Furthermore they use a different family of interfacing chips, which can be important as far as the speed of the computer is concerned. For example, there is a sophisticated DMA (Direct Memory Access) chip for the Z80 family CPUs (Z80A, Z80B, Z8000, etc.) that speeds up the opera tion of the computer by handling all the data transfers between the disks, ports, and memory. A computer does not have to contain one of these to use a Z80 CPU. The Osborne Executive has one but the Osborne 1 does not. Also the primary clock speed for the CPU affects the overall speed of the computer. Another variable between computers that can affect the overall speed, and word processing speed, are the disk controllers and disk drives; however one must remember that reliability is a more important factor in choosing controller and drive combinations.
The speed of a program does not depend on the level of the language in which it is written if that language is compiled into relatively fast machine code. A program will tend to be slow if the language is not compiled but interpreted by an interpreter such as MBASIC, or the many resident BASIC interpreters on smaller computers.
Speed is not directly affected by the "bits," ie. 8-bits or 16-bits of the machine. What these numbers refer to are the size of internal data registers in the CPU. Neither do these sizes indicate the memory capacity. That is determined by the size of internal address registers in the CPU. What limits the Z80 and the 6502 to 64K is their 16-bit address registers. The 8088 and 8086 have a 20 bit address register which gives them up to 1,048,576 memory locations to work with, if the computer provides that much physical memory. The 8088 has an 8-bit data bus and the 8086 has a 16-bit data bus, but each works with internal 16-bit data registers. What makes the 8088 computers faster than the 6502 computers is that 8088 will run at a faster primary clock speed than the 6502. There is a general drift in design improvement that makes the newer chips run at faster speeds than the older chips. But watch out. New versions of the same CPUs that run faster than their older predecessors are coming out, so there is no firm speed line between 16 and 8 bit CPUs.
Needless to say, these computer details are a bit technical, but I feel that potential customers have a duty to drive computer salesmen completely mad with questions about these things. It keeps them on their toes. I have never had any speed problems with WordStar on any Z80 machine, not even on an Osborne-I with only a 2 mz clock and no DMA.
Although it is obvious to most people, still I feel that someone should say the following. "The MacIntosh will not run any of the software developed on the Apple II although it carries the same brand name." The Apple company is holding up serious pro fessional use of their machines by trying to lock users into their non-standard operating systems and disk formats. The manufacturers of CP/M systems are also creating problems by not moving ahead with cheap flexible graphics hardware on their computers. Since MacIntoshes are being given to university people this year in hopes that they will produce some of the needed software, some more comments about existing software for them would be welcome.
Lets replace machine chauvinism with standardized software interfaces. Then people could use each other's programs and not become pawns in the games that microcomputer manufacturers are playing with each other. Are we socially interacting with our microcomputers like the Nuer interact with their cows? Will the manufacturers succeed in diverting us from our scientific goals into competitive cow judging? What animal species then benefits? Genus: company. Species: big. And, that's not the one I belong to.
This section of the CAANews is devoted to reports of what anthropologists are doing with computers. Please send the information on what you are doing, your successes and failures, and what you are interested in to the editors. We will publish your reports with your name and address so our other readers can get in touch with you if there is a possibility of mutual assistance. The reports are going into a data-base that can be searched in the future if someone needs to find a person to help with a CAA problem. We will also publish comments here.
Please let us know if you would also like to participate in an on-line conference to exchange this information. For this you need a terminal, a local network port, and at least $6.00 per hour.
Is someone out there interested in starting and running an Anthropology bulletin board system? Ideally, is would be usable by Apple, IBM, and CP/M users, have a hard disk, and be available most evenings and weekends. Possibly someone is willing to investigate starting a conference on CompuServe. Read Russ Bernard's letter about ScienceNet in the December Anthropology Newsletter.
J. Jerome Smith, has begun a research and curriculum development project supported by the University of South Florida Office of Technology and the University of South Florida Media Center. The immediate goal of the project is to transform an existing 26-part videotape course (Coast Telecourse's Faces of Culture) into a self-paced interactive video and microcomputer course that will be 100% computer run and managed. Students work at their own pace at stations in the Media Center. Smith is working with an Apple 2E linked to a Panasonic AG-6200 VCR by a BCD 450 interface, using BCD's software. Person's interested, or engaged in similar work are invited to contact Dr. Smith.
John Seidel and Jack Clark of Qualis Research Associates (611 E. Nichols Dr., Littleton, Colorado 80302. (303) 795-5378) have announced the ETHNOGRAPH. This is a program for qualitative analysis of text for the IBM PC, MS-DOS, Valdocs, and CP/M, for $150.
Many, many universities are starting small-scale funding programs for micro-computing. Hey! Let's wake up! Anthropology needs more funding! One way to go get some of this money is to cooperate. Let's all see if we can think of some way to coordinate proposals at different schools, and thereby make all the proposals look better, more cost-efficient, etc.
As a follow-up to Don Messerschmidt's article in this issue of CAAN on clean power in the field, see also "No Fault Power" by Al Paarmann, in the December-January 1985 issue of Micro Cornucopia. Paarmann covers much the same ground but from a more technical standpoint. For example, instead of buying a battery charger, he builds one from spare parts. I find comfort in the fact that Messerschmidt and Paarmann develop nearly identical systems. At the end of the Paarmann article, the Micro C editors point out that the Kaypro will not be happy with an inverter that outputs square waves instead of sine waves. This could be true for other machines too.
The Center for Computer Applications in the Humanities is a new office intended to encourage computer use and acquire programs useful in the humanities. We are very much oriented toward text processing and text analysis as opposed to the sta tistical applications characteristic of the social sciences. We are using a MacIntosh as a word processor and remote terminal to a VAX on which we program in ICON, a string-oriented programming language which is structured like Pascal and more general than SNOBOL4. This gives us a combination of adequate computing power and storage capacity with MacIntosh graphics and user-definable fonts. Contact person: Gary Palmer, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Nevada, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154.
[Newsletter buffs might be interested in "Computing the Humanities: The newsletter of the Center for Computer Applications in the Humanities" from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Volume 1, no. 1 contained news about the UNLV computer facility and reviews of ThinkTank, Kamas, and the MacIntosh. Eds.]
I have just recently started to use a micro for word processing and would like to begin using a data base. My main problem is deciding whether to stick with the Commodore 8032 or switch to one of the Apple line (We also own a MacIntosh). Any insights on compatibility, durability, etc. would be appreciated, as well as suggestions concerning field use. Contact person: Janet Benson, Dept. of Soc., Anth. and S. W., Waters Hall, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan, Kansas 66506.
I am planning to use a Radio Shack Model 100 for my next field study and am very interested in how the Model 100s (and other like it) have worked out and held up under field conditions. I also just found out about a portable typewriter (5 lbs) put out by Brothers that runs on batteries and can interface with the Model 100 and be used as a printer. It sounds like a very useful piece of equipment. Contact person: Linda Sussman, Epidemiology Program, Dept. of Psychiatry, Medical School Box 8134, Washington Univ. Medical Center, 4940 Audubon Ave., St. Louis, Missouri 63110.
I work in applied anthropology in development projects and am developing a computer program for processing "rapidly gathered data" for both project design and evaluation. The program is in the initial state at the moment, but will be glad to share it once it is finished and works. Contact person: Ivo Kraljevic, 6309 Tamar Drive, Columbia, Maryland 21045.
I am using network models and a data base management system in an effort aimed at describing a metropolitan area as a network of organizations. Specifically, in a pilot project I have gathered information on more than 500 health and human services organizations that serve children and families in the several counties of the Tampa Bay area. These data are maintained in a cobol-based data base management system which permits us to work with a variety of kinds of linkages among the organizations. We can then describe and analyze the networks formed by those linkages. Taking such linkages as indicators of closeness, for example, we can measure the distances among various types of organizations, and can compare the closeness in one county with that in another. Similarly, we can measure the degree of centrality of each organization and calculate an index of centrality for the whole network or some specified segment of it. We can use the data on links among organizations to do multidimensional scaling which permits us to generate a graphic representation of the network, essentially a map based on social and organizational distances rather than geographical distances. Further, we are using clustering algorithms which help us to identify structurally equivalent organizations in these very complex metropolitan networks of organizations. I consider what we are doing as a new kind of ethnography, specifically "holistic electronic ethnography", of which this current work is only a pilot project. Contact Person: Alvin Wolfe, Dept. of Anth., University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620.
I am just starting to use computers in teaching and research. I am working on evaluating programs in the Social and Behavioral Sciences on the PLATO system and writing hard copy evaluations. Carl Lewis (Anth. Dept. , Genesee Community College, College Rd., P. O. Box 718, Batavia, N.Y. 14020) ran a computer workshop at the AAA meetings. He has uncovered a lot of programs and has prepared a bibliography relating to anthropology and computers. My school has just set up a micro-lab (IBM-PC, Apple- IIe, and TRS-80). Our resource person is not much help in finding software for instructional purposes in anthropology. As I find and field test software, I would be happy to share my findings. I have just finished a small research project exploring instructional programs on the cerl system of PLATO. I would like to find out what is on other systems of PLATO so that I could request it for the cerl system. There is an excellent archaeology program developed by Prof. David C. Grove at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign called "The Dig." Contact person: Charles Ellenbaum, Social and Behavioral Sciences, College of DuPage, 22nd St. and Lambert Rd., Glen Ellyn, Ill. 60137.
Ellenbaum has compiled a volume of 164 evaluations of PLATO instructional programs. The volume includes four programs that can be used to teach anthropology: "An Introduction to Anthropology," "Natural Selection," "Population Genetics: Hardy- Weinberg Principle," and "The Dig -- An Archaeological Simulation." To use these programs your institution must subscribe to a PLATO system. The entire catalog which covers many items of PLATO courseware on the CERL system is available from Professor Ellenbaum who will send a copy to anyone who writes him.
The workshop "Computer Applications in the Teaching of Anthropology" will be run again at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in 1985. If you wish to participate contact Prof. Ellenbaum.
At the Southwest Institute for Research on Women we are using an IBM PC-XT to process data on our longitudinal study of recent widows. We are using Statpac for initial basic statistical processing of the closed-ended questions. Although the documentation for Statpac is easy to read, certain problems, such as limitations on number of lines in the codebook, are not mentioned in the manual. It appears that Statpac does not work well for a large number of variables, and that it cannot handle as many variables as stated in the manual. Does anyone know of another statistical package for the PC that might be better?
I am also trying to develop a computer-assisted system for coding our 30 to 40 pages of open-ended data for each respondent. These data will also contribute to the eventual statistical analysis, using SAS or SPSS on a mainframe. Does anyone know of any content analysis software for MS-DOS? Has anyone found any software that will allow experienced anthropologists to set up guidelines, on the computer, thus permitting research assistants to do most of the day-to-day coding? Contact person: Cynthia Tobias, Southwest Institute for Research on Women, Modern Languages 265, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.
[Editors comment -- To allow a research assistant to enter data in response to a series of prompts you need to write a program specific to your data and database format. Programs like this are often easy to write in a language developed for computer aided instruction (CAI). PILOT is such a language. Morrow (600 McCormick Street, San Leandro, Calif. 94577) has adapted PILOT to their CP/M Z-80 computers. There is also an MBASIC version of PILOT in the public domain which Jim Dow (co-editor) will send to anyone mailing a disk to him for that purpose. You may be able to get it off your local RCPM system. It is commonly found as PILOT80.LBR. Another solution is to write your own program in a language like PC BASIC. Write it so that the parts of the menu that you want to change can be easily modified.]
Joanne Crawford is doing research in psychological anthropology and is interesting in trying out computer simulation to test psychodynamic hypotheses. Her project is on Basque cultural personal and its relation to socio-cultural phenomena. Contact person: C. Joanne Crawford, Ph.D., Professor of Psychological Anthropology, Facultad de Filosofia y CC.Ed., Universidad del Pai's Vasco, Apartado 1.249, San Sebastian, Guipuzcoa, Spain.
I am a dissertator in Andean archaeology at the University of Wisconsin's Department of Anthropology, and have fifteen years experience in data processing as a systems analyst, programmer, and computer consultant. Within data processing, I have worked with a variety of computer systems including large mainframes, micros, word processors, and photocomposers. As well, I am familiar with a number of computer languages, including BASIC and COBOL. I am combining my computer background with my own research in anthropology, and acting as a computer consultant to other researchers. My master's thesis was a computer data base design for the storage, retrieval, and analysis of archaeological site data from the north coast of Peru. Currently, I am working on a computer-aided demographic analysis of prehispanic villages in the central Andes of Peru, using both archaeological remains and early colonial documents. Employing a similar Ecuadorian colonial document, I am handling the computer/statistical end of a linguistic analysis of aboriginal names being done with Frank Salomon, also of Wisconsin. My anthropological interests lie in spatial analysis, demographic analysis, and statistics; my data processing interests center around database management, data sharing, word processing/data processing interfacing, and telecommunications. Contact person: Sue Grosboll, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.
Material should be submitted to the editors at the addresses which follow. News, letters, notes, and articles are welcome. We prefer material submitted electronically on 5 1/4 diskettes or sent to User 70150,266 on CompuServe. Subscriptions are only $5.00 for four issues.
Lee Sailer
CAANews
Dept. of Anthropology
Univ. of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260
Tel: (412) 624-3388
James Dow
CAANews
Dept. of Soc. and Anth.
Oakland Univ.
Rochester, Mich. 48063
Tel: (313) 370-2430
We can accept diskettes in the following formats: A.B. Dick Magna II, Actrix (SSDD, DSDD), Chameleon CP/M-80 (SSDD, DSDD), Chameleon CP/M-86 (SSDD, DSDD), Cromenco CDOS (SSSD, SSDD, DSSD, DSDD), Cromenco IT CP/M (SSDD, DSDD), Datavue, Dec VT-80, Epson QX-10, Heath/Zenith Magnolia CP/M, HP- 125, IBM-PC CPM-86(SSDD, DSDD), IBM PC-DOS(V1, V2, SSDD, DSDD), PC disk compatibles with MS-DOS, IMS 5000, Kaypro (2, 4, 10), LOBO MAX-80, MAGIC, Morrow (MD-2, MD-3), NCR Decision Mate V, NEC PC-8001 (SSDD, DSDD), Osborne-1 (SSSD, SSDD), Osborne Exc., Otrona, Sanyo MBC-1000, Superbrain (Jr. 35 track, 40 track, QD) Televidio (TS802, TS803, TS806, TPC-I), TI Prof. CP/M-86, Toshiba T-100, TRS-80 I Omikron CP/M, TRS-80 III Memory Merchants CP/M, TRS-80 IV Montezuma CP/M, Xerox (820, 820-II (SS, DS)), Zenith (Z-90, Z-100 (SS DS)).