The University has set up a CENTRE FOR SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMPUTING .
Membership is: Nevill Colclough, Janet Bagg, John Davis (Director), Jerry Eades, Roy Ellen, Michael Fischer, Tahera Ghaderi, Jeremy Kemp, Nick Ryan.
The purpose of CSAC is mainly to give us a collective identity, a name on which to hang our various activities. It has its own electronic address: for the JANET system, use
The Bulletin Board is now complete and ready to go into action in a month or so, as soon as some adjustments to the UKC system have been made: details in the next issue of BICA.
The editor apologises to readers and contributors for the delay in getting this issue out: pressure of work in a university which does not provide much vertical integration of labour. Another issue is nearly ready, and should follow shortly.
Harvey Goldberg (Sociology & Social Anthropology, Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel) writes: I noticed a description of a program called ETHNOGRAPH in Qualitative Sociology 7 (1/2) 1984. It is based on word-processing of course, but claims to be of special use to ethnographers. Has anyone in the BICA network had any experience with it?
No one in CSAC has. But we too would be pleased to hear about it, and will publish details if you send them to us.
A program for formatting bibliographies on personal computers.
Jon Pedersen (Ethnographic Museum, University of Oslo, Frederiksgate 2, Oslo 1, Norway) contributes the following note:
Three ways in which a computer can aid the production of bibliographies are: keeping track of bibliographic information in a database; sorting a list of references, and formatting the references to one or another standard format. LITLIS takes care of the formatting step, and relies on database management programs for the two other tasks. From files produced by either CARDBOX or DATASTAR (or any program that can produce files which are compatible with one of those programs) LITLIS will produce a formatted list of references in either Wordstar or WordPerfect internal file format or directly to a printer. LITLIS gives considerable control over the style of the output: line length; amount of indentation; punctuation, bold, underlined or capitalised titles; abbreviation of forenames; placement of the various parts of a reference in relation to each other, and several other parameters. Particular combinations of the various options may be saved in a file, thus relieving the user from the task of setting all the options every time. The program can expand abbreviated journal titles, e.g. AA as a journal title may be expanded to `American Anthropologist'. The list of abbreviations may be changed by the user.
The program runs on IBM-PC compatible computers as well as some CP/M-80 machines with a Z80 CPU and 64K memory. (There is a version for the Epson QX-10, but I do not know at the moment whether LITLIS works on others). LITLIS comes with database definition forms for CARDBOX and DATASTAR, but you have to get one of those programs in addition. In the not too far future a simple memory-resident file manager will be added to the IBM version. This will make it possible to add to the bibliography while editing text with a word processor.
Social anthropologists may obtain LITLIS by sending two formatted 5 1/4 disks to me. (One disk is for the program, the other covers postage). I can transfer the program to several CP/M formats, but by no means all \*-one type of system that I cannot handle is unfortunately the Armstrad range of CP/M computers, but the Armstrad MS-DOS machine is OK.