More information on the early development and applications of the Donne Variorum Textual Collation Program may be found here:

Stringer, Gary A. and William R. Vilberg. \"The Donne Variorum Textual Collation Program.\" Computers and the Humanities 21.2 (1987): 83-89. Web.

Program Overview

DV-COLL is a data entry and textual collation program originally developed in the 1980s by the Donne Variorum to facilitate digitizing and updating The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Stringer and Vilberg 83).

The Donne Variorum's Advisory Board began investigating their options for digitization in 1981, and identified microcomputers as relatively inexpensive and the most convenient computer system available (83). They first tried two preexisting collation programs developed for the Apple II + (Stringer and Vilberg 85). The first was a PASCAL program called Imitatio Christi, which could manage up to six variations at a time but relied on the user to locate variations by sight and resolve them manually (Stringer and Vilberg 86). The second was an unnamed program, described as

Dearing's adaptation for the microcomputer of the COBOL code that the editors of the California Dryden project have run for years on the UCLA mainframe. This program...performs word-by-word comparison of variants, but like the other, is specifically written for the Apple II + with language card. (86)

However, the project had already transcribed and numbered each of Donne's poems, and assigned an 11-character identification code to each record (Stringer and Vilberg 84). They also encoded metadata indicating the source, page numbers, format of source, date of transcription, transcriber, title, line of the poem, any applicable subscriptions, and distinctive features of the original text (ex: scribal flourishes or orthographic peculiarities) alongside the poems (84). They required a program that could not only handle this metadata, but assist in reconciling variant versions of Donne's poems.

Neither Imitatio Christi nor the Dearing program fully met the Donne Variorum's needs, so Bill Vilberg and Bruce Dinoff wrote a BASIC program in two major phases to meet the project's requirements (Stringer and Vilberg 86). This program ran on microcomputers, with versions for CP/M machines, including the Apple II +, for the IBM-PC and the TRS-80 (86). This program, which was soon called DV-COLL, was

[q]uite flexible and powerful in its present form, the program can collate up to fourteen versions of a poem simultaneously. Individual lines may extend to 256 characters each, far more than enough capacity to handle even the longest lines in Whitman and roughly twice the compressed-print line-length of the eighty-column printer. (86)

The program handled data in small quantities and 48k of memory was sufficient to run it (86). It was restricted by the length of the text, the disk capacity available for the variants users wished to collate, and whether the user wanted to store the output on disk for later access or manipulation with a word processor (86). The output could be displayed onscreen or printed instead (86).

Users could choose from three options for output. Firstly, DV-COLL could show each line of the text next to the corresponding line from each variant (86). It could also flag each distinct version of a line (Stringer and Vilberg 87). Thirdly, it could compare individual words of each alternate version of a line to the master text, and flag words according to whether they're variants, deleted or additional (87). In the line and word comparison instances, DV-COLL displayed exact matches to the master version as a blank line or space, showing only the variations in full (87).

Stringer and Vilburg also described key features of DV-COLL's interface:

A number of built-in internal features make the program versatile and easy to use. Once a collation run is completed, the program returns to its opening menu, which shows a numbered list of the files currently entered for processing, and allows the editor either to break out of BASIC and turn to other tasks or to proceed with additional collation. At this point the operator can exercise any of the several options that are available at initial boot up: to clear the list and enter new files for collation, to re-collate the currently entered batch at a different level, to insert or delete files from the list, to re-order the files in any way desired, to call up a disk directory of files available for collation, or to look at a help screen. (Stringer and Vilburg 88-89)

The Donne Variorum released DV-COLL to the wider academic community as \"a contribution to the field of textual editing,\" and Stringer and Vilburg judged that the project \"made every effort to ensure that the program will be friendly to the scholars who need to use it\" (89). Interested users could purchase both the program and its documentation directly from The Donne Variorum for $10 (89).

Note: The Donne Variorum has continued development on DV-COLL and now offers it for free download through their website.

Source

Stringer, Gary A. and William R. Vilberg. \"The Donne Variorum Textual Collation Program.\" Computers and the Humanities 21.2 (1987): 83-89. Web.