Contentware

Edited by Iván Horváth

Written by Iván Horváth, András Nyírő, Márton Szentpéteri, Katalin Szőke, Zsuzsa Tószegi

Translated by Éva Csillik and J. D. Urquhart

Music by the Kirnberger Composer Machine

Special thanks to Andor Márton Horváth, Lili Horváth, Ákos Teslár and Tünde Tóth.

Quirinus Kuhlmann's automata composing artificial sonnets
(Himmlische Liebesküsse, 1671)
Made by Gábor Molnár, on the basis of Péter Benits' reconstruction
Hungarian text translated after László Márton's former version

- Softwares in the field of literature, arts, music and science

- On-line publications

- Poetry and music composing machines from the 17^th -18^th century

May Hungarian contentware products be interesting for the representatives of the world's book business? Are there any new solutions of universal validity in the field of Hungarian contentware?

Hungary has taken its share in the revolution of informatics so far.

János Neumann was not the only Hungarian pioneer of cybernetics. He was inspired by the ideas of a scientific workshop that operated in Budapest.

Rudolf Ortvay, a professor at the Budapest Institute of Technology let Neumann - who worked in the USA at that time - know the ideas of discussion that were going on in Budapest.

Here is a letter of February 16, 1941 that was written in Budapest by Ortvay to Neumann:

- CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs are still considered as off-line devices like books. The great qualitative change is caused by the on-line publications which were edited specifically for the net. Publishers and booksellers may well fear that a new epoch will open from now on.

- We also show how the new epoch does not differ very much from the old one. The "McLuhan-galaxy" bears some likeness to the "Gutenberg-galaxy". In the age of the information boom we are facing the same difficulties as we did during the previous boom in the 16th -18th centuries when modern book output and big libraries sprang into existence.

The fanatics of logic and memory machines before the ages of electrotechnics - Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Athanasius Kircher, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Quirinus Kuhlmann and others - followed and continuouly reinterpreted the combinatorial art of Ramón Llull, the Catalan scholar who lived in the Middle Ages. From the point of view of the Hungarian-German cultural relations in the Early Modern, Johann Heinrich Alsted acquired special importance. The greatest encyclopedist of his time, systematizing knowledge, he applied Llull's method. He used the art of combination in his young days in Herborn, Germany and towards the end of his life in Transylvania as well, while working as the first professor at Bethlen College, Alba Iulia.

"…in omnibus artibus iubeo te attendere ad combinationem, ceu proram et puppim eruditionis"

"…in all arts I force you to apply the art of combination that is the beginning and the end of erudition"

(Alsted's warning towards his pupil in his Transylvanian Rudimenta linguae Latinae, 1634)

You do not need a computer to create or read a combinatorial poem but you may need some aid of a simple device.

Raymond Queneau's thin volume of poetry or song-book (1961) for instance consists of just ten sonnets which are of consonant rhyme. Each sonnet is printed on a separate page. The pages were cut into stripes by the lines of poetry already in the printery. Wherever you open this book you can see a sonnet you will never see again, since this volume contains between its refined covers a hundred thousand billion poems which is more than enough to read for a million centuries.

The French text-generator, a kind of poetry-creating program - that is made by Tibor Papp, who used Queneau's book - automatically takes care of organizing the lines of sonnets at random, without even turning the pages over. If you wish, this text-generator can terminate the original volume's feature that is as follows: there are two sonnets - the first and the last one - put on a decorated place. The Hungarian metrical poetry generator of the poet is the Disztichon Alfa. The database of this generator contains the prosody rules plus 24 empty structure of sentence and about 2400 words.

In 1679 John Peter, an Englishman, received royal patent rights for a procedure which is partially identical with Tibor Papp's creation in his Disztichon Alfa. It is an insignificant difference that John Peter used dice instead of a random-number generator and tabulations instead of databases.

Throw the dice and get six numbers between 1 and 9. Put down the numbers one after another. Make your move onto the square where your first cast of the dice was. Put down the obtained letter. Then move nine steps forward. Put down the obtained letter. Then move nine steps forward ... and so on. Having reached the end of the tabulation you are in possession of the first word. For possessing your second word use the second tabulation. Make your move onto the square where your second cast of the dice was. Put down the obtained letter. Then move nine steps forward ... and so on.

Using a simple program you can imitate John Peter's method.

Peter could rely on similar attempts: Quirinus Kuhlmann created a sonnet composing machine (1671), Georg Philipp Harsdörffer represented the permutation poetry composing automata in his Delights of Mathematics and Physics (1647), and the twenty-year-old Leibniz, in his essay About the Combinatorial Art (1666), gave the general theory of these automata.

We brought to Frankfurt a possible mechanical reconstruction of Kuhlmann's sonnet composing procedure. Spin the disks round and create a new variant of Kuhlmann's sonnet! It can be owed to László Márton, a Hungarian poet, that while you are doing so you are just creating the Hungarian translation of your new German sonnet variant.

Permutation generally means that the Web (and interactive CD-ROMs) provides an opportunity for using different access paths. The CD-ROM composition Das anatomische Theater by Milorad Krstić and Roczkov Radmila is a proportional system of symmetries and discrepancies among the possible access paths.

As for music, we would like to demonstrate a funny software that is the Kirnberger-Mozart way of musical composing. This program will take some explaining.

From 1757 to 1813 more than a dozen musicial dicegames were published. With the help of these games everybody could compose polonaises and minuets without actually knowing how to compose.

Important figures, such as Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Mozart, and Haydn amused themselves with these pass-times, but the technique of composing using mechanical methods came from the 17^th century.

The numbers above show the bars of the minuet or polonaise. The numbers in the table belong to the bar-numbers. At the beginning of the game the composer rolls for example a 6, then looks for the bar from the table, rolls again and compiles the new bar to the former.

Joseph Haydn composed his musical games (Gioco Filarmonico) for two violins (or flutes) and a bass. Its principles are similar to those of Kirnberger's. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach published his Anleitung mit zwei Würfel zu komponieren, so viele man will, ohne etwas von der Musik oder Composition zu verstehen in 1790. Also, there are some musical games published under Mozart's name, and there are a lot of Mozart's pieces we can find variations, combinations and permutation in. The best-known example for permutation occurs in the last movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

One of the advantages of using the Internet which is mentioned several times is that it makes texts easily available. But nobody mentions that sometimes the Internet abets in killing texts.

Selected Hungarian web-magazines and web-periodicals. According to the prevailing trend in Hungary the amount spent on producing web-magazines and web-periodicals is not charged end users.

Home pages and in some cases catalogues show the traditional libraries on the Net.

There are three kinds of virtual libraries (electronic text-collections) in Hungary.

One of them these, the Hungarian Electronic Library (Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár, MEK), which rests on a wide movement for text digitalization. Its aim is to become the central text-collection on the Internet with texts that are available without any restriction. Anyway, the library services of the MEK are very pleasant.

Neumann-house (Neumann-ház) makes an attempt to collect authoritative texts exclusively. They digitalize traditional (hard copy) critical editions of Hungarian classics. The Contemporary Literature Center (Kortárs Irodalmi Központ) has digitalized books written by Hungarian contemporary writers who have been given the highest government award by the political leadership in power since the end of the 1940s.

There are also publications which are not the net variants of hard copies. They are new databases that are created for scientific research or the net critical editions of classics or Internet text-books for schools.

These products are very expensive. Publishers worry about putting them on the net. They do not often get into free virtual libraries. How can you stop stealing publications?

In the old days, after publishing a book and giving it over to the salesman, the scientific publisher’s job was over. Nowadays the publisher's task starts mostly with publishing.

With the example of machine processing in the field of early Hungarian poetry we demonstrate that publishing is replaced by book service in sciences.

The main phases of processing history:

- 1976: manual processing, using marginal punchcards. (You can see the machine made in the German Democratic Republic in the lower part of the tableau. Have a look at the original knitting needles!)

- 1977-79: the very first machine database is created

- 1983: database utilization by means of a network system using another PC in another city

- 1988: results are demonstrated on a scientific session

- 1992: publication of the Répertoire de la poésie hongroise ancienne on diskettes and in a two-volume manual in Paris

- 1993: the first Internet publication of the Répertoire

- Generally you can look up a poem in more than one single book (either in a manuscript or in a printed one). Several books appertain to a poem.

- Generally a book contains more than one single poem. Several poems appertain to a book.

Regarding the database, one of the theoretical results is as follows: the new, plural concept of the text. The unit of recording is not a poem nor a manuscript or a printed book, but encountering these.

The example of machine processing in the field of old Hungarian poetry demonstrates that the database has been in touch with the scientific team that created it 20 years ago. The same scientific workshop - with a staff whose members are naturally replaced now and then - refresh the database if it is necessary and upgrade it as well. Any other inexpert team would not be able to do this job. Stealing the database - and providing with the accompanying services - would be nonsense.

The members of the database team are paid. But their salary does not come from the end users. The team members are paid by their scientific institute. The situation is the same at a traditional academic library: you do not need to pay for anything but reading books there.

After publication the scientific publications on the net stay in a tight bond with the scientific workshop which created them - as long as this team's creative energy is kept.

All over the world publishers are unwilling to let their critical editions - that took a long time and heavy expenditure to complete - be put on the Internet. For fear of stealing, publishers prefer CD-ROM publication.

Hungarian critical editions are among the first ones on the Net

Principles regarding edition:

- There is no connection between financing and end-use.

- Editing attached to some sort of a scientific workshop which is in possession of a contract with the publisher.

- Editions are not set up with protection against hacking. Security has been reached by such additional services that can be given only by experts. Services are planned to be given for several years.

- Editions are programmable ones. That is why they are in possession of some special facilities you could not even have thought about earlier.

- Editions should also be valuable and essential from the point of view of traditional philology.

Attila József is one of those 12 prominent personages whose bust is set up in the Hungarian National Pantheon in the Hungarian Pantheon of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

• Books based on HTML and other internet standards
• Navigational tools (typed links, see-also lists, guides) clarify relations of ideas
• User tools (notes, highlighters, user links, bookmarks) help to understand and to learn the topic
• adaptable contents of books that meet users' different knowledge
• Hierarchical catalogue of available materials and books
• Standardized tests based on HTML
• Dockable popup window to display additions
• Password protected multi-user operation
• Suitable for internet, intranet and local books simultaneously

• typed links indicate the subjects of referred pages
• user-defined links represent user's associations
• table of contents separates main and additional parts of the book
• see-also lists for arranged enumeration of related items
• guides to walk through prepared paths inside a book
• local map always shows neighborhood of pages
• red-line indicates non-read parts of the content
• search through the whole text of a book
• Links between pages of different books
• History records user's track

• Minerva II Developer Tools help to prepare link types, table of contents, see-also lists and other data
• Unique security code for each book