JEUDEMO
JEUDEMO was an information retrieval program developed at the University of Montreal in the 1970s. It built on and extended the functionality of COCOA by including Boolean search functions to search for patterns within a text such as co-occurences, but saw limited adoption as it required texts to be supplied on punched cards or paper tape and was programmed in a language exclusive to the CDC Cyber 74 computer system.
Documentation
Attributes
- Type of analysis: Search Analysis Discovering
- Ease of Use: Easy
- Warning: Limited Uses
- Usage: Limited Uses
- Historic Tool (developed before 2005): Influential No longer in active development
- TaDiRAH Goals: Analysis
- TaDiRAH Methods: Discovering Other (analysis)
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More information about JEUDEMO is available via two articlesf from its creators:
Bratley, Paul, Serge Lusignan and Francine Ouellette. \"JEUDEMO: A Text-Handling System.\" Computers and the Humanities. Ed. J. L. Mitchell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974. 234-239.
Bratley, Paul, Serge Lusignan and Francine Ouellette. \"JEUDEMO, A Package for Scholars in the Humanities.\" SIGLASH Newsletter 7.3 (1974): 15-19.
Program Overview
JEUDEMO was an information retrieval program for text building on COCOA developed at the University of Montreal by Paul Bratley, Serge Lusignan and Francine Ouellette in the 1970s (Oakman 178).
It combined the functions of COCOA with Boolean search capabilities to locate co-occurrences and other patterns:
The user first defines his on hierarchies of text--word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc. Then, using its pattern-searching features, JEUDEMO can look for two words, like \"boy\" and \"dog,\" occurring in the same sentence, in the same paragraph, or within ten words from each other in the whole text. (Oakman 179)
JEUDEMO required text to be in punched card or Flexowriter paper tape format (Oakman 178). Its commands were developed with inexperienced programmers, with the aim of making the program accessible to Humanists without computer backgrounds, and an interactive version was planned (178).
However, JEUDEMO had a prohibitive drawback, as the developers chose to program it in a system-exclusive language that limited its audience to only those scholars with access to a CDC Cyber 74 system (Oakman 179). Robert Oakman found this requirement to be a major barrier to the program's wide adoption (179).
JEUDEMO was nevertheless a notable contribution to text analysis, as Oakman found that \"[c]ompared to COCOA, its forerunner, JEUDEMO offers attractive additional features and a few easy commands that humanists can learn to use quickly\" (179).
Source
Oakman, Robert L. Computer Methods for Literary Research. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.