David J. Birnbaum (djb@clover.slavic.pitt.edu)
Copyright © 1996-97 by David J. Birnbaum
All rights reserved
The University of Pittsburgh, working in collaboration with Pushkin Center at the University of Wisconsin (David M. Bethea, director), has obtained nine reels of tape prepared by J. Thomas Shaw for his computer-assisted study of the poetry of A. S. Pushkin (1799-1837), E. A. Baratynskij (1800-1844), and K. N. Batjushkov (1787-1855). These tapes were generated on a UNIVAC between 1969-1973 and were used by Professor Shaw for research purposes through 1982, but they have not been refreshed since that time, and have remained essentially inaccessible to scholars. If the data on them can be retrieved, both electronic full-text corpora of pivotal Russian nineteenth-century poetry, as well as secondary resources prepared by Professor Shaw, such as concordance and frequency files, will again become available.
Eileen Kopchik and Barbara Hieber of the University of Pittsburgh were able to read four of these tapes. One proved to contain UNIVAC utilities and what appeared to be an ancient version of Dungeons and Dragons, but nothing pertaining to Russian poetry. Three others appear to contain concordances and frequency analyses; these do not appear to contain transcriptions of entire poems, but there is sufficient indexing information in the concordances that the original poems could probably be reconstructed automatically. These three tapes have been transcribed to disk space on a University of Pittsburgh SparcStation and backed up to a second University of Pittsburgh UNIX machine.
Five other tapes were in a 7-track format that we were unable to read at the University of Pittsburgh, and we are currently looking for a suitable tape machine elsewhere.