μ-EYEBALL: An interactive system for producing stylistic descriptions and comparisons

We have revised the mainframe EYEBALL, written in the early 1970s and used by several researchers during that decade, to run on microcomputers. This program parses English language texts and provides a statistical description of many linguistic features which are of interest to those involved in stylistics. In order to produce an analytical approach which goes beyond the simple reporting of linguistic data, we have selected a small number of features which characterize noticeable elements of the language used and we have written programs to facilitate statistical comparisons among texts. While EYEBALL is not automatic, the interactive parsing routines are elegant enough that the users spend most of their time confirming accurate guesses, rather than having to determine the structure of each phrase and clause. We hope that the program will be used by humanities scholars who have not previously been inclined to wrestle with the barriers of mainframe computing in the past.