User:Sidney Duane Orr
Sidney Duane Orr
Born and raised in Southern California, this user's father was a prominent baseball umpire, Pat Orr.
This user studied widely in the humanities; completed a B.A. at UCLA in 1970, and nearly completed an M.A. in English Literature at California State University, Dominguez Hills, pursued further graduate studies at UCLA, concentrating on linguistics, computer science, modern poetry, and Elizabethan English literature. The user has a smattering of French, Spanish, Attic and Modern Greek, and Hebrew.
This user was among the first to apply the newer-generation IBM mainframes, vintage-late 1960s, to large tasks in the humanities; primarily manipulation of several complete poetic or dramatic texts, simultaneously, with the help of his Mentor, the late Professor Vinton Dearing at UCLA, a renowned pioneer of computing in the humanities, IBM's first Fellow in the Humanities, and the world's most prominent user of computers to address problems in textual analysis. Building on Professor Dearing's work, this user collaborated with other UCLA faculty, to produce Three concordances - on the English poems of Thomas Traherne, Andrew Marvell, and Ben Jonson. Without a computer, earlier scholars had usually labored several decades, or their entire career, to produce a single such concordance.
Many future generations of scholars of English Literature will benefit from concordances, especially since Oxford University Press (OUP), which claims copyright over these ancient Elizabethan texts, is reluctant to provide the texts used for these concordances in machine-readable form - for an indefinite time. Their policy is to extract a "use" fee, from those who wish to create a machine-readable text. The rationale apparently, is that the text to be used, was assembled by earlier scholars, on paper, and published by OUP. In some cases, in the 19th century. Scholars who assemble and edit a complete edition of a author's work, are meticulous, and the finest of the fine editions are considered canonical editions. These are the editions which concordance-makers seek to process with computing tools, for concordances and other scholarly tools.
This user also was possibly the first to apply the computer to certain other textual editing problems, such as the need for a text to be seen and reviewed by many people concurrently. Each of whom might add comments, or raise issues around certain matter in the base text at hand. The user wrote a program to present a text, present comments that had been made - in context - and, allow new comments to be added to the existing set, or as a specific response to an earlier comment. The underlying technology was accomplished primarily with a relational database (RDBMS.
The reviewing process Mr Orr's code accomplished was done in real time, in the late 1980's, and he copyrighted the program's code about 1989. Reluctant to apply for a patent, since such a process had traditionally not been considered patentable, he later saw and noted dozens of patents granted to others regarding their programmatic code to do the same thing; most of whom were subsets of his program.
This user was an amateur musician, who played the piano and studied the Santoor, and gave piano recitals, and competed in national competitions as a teenager, early in the 1960s. He studied composition and musicology with Nicolas Slonimsky - a prominent musicologist - at UCLA.
This user is a minor (but relatively popular) artist online, and minor (but published) scholar in genomics and textual analysis.
This user is an Information Technology generalist, and developed among the earliest RDBMS database editors and groupware at IBM in the early 1980s. ("DBEDIT" copyright IBM Corporation 1986) More recently, concentrating on Middleware, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools. and Genomic data:
This user's forebears were professional athletes, writers, poets, Rabbis, farmers, horse traders, and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry -- a few latter-day descendants intermarried with those tribes they formerly slaughtered (according to family history).
Publications, Recognition
http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Saccharomyces/nar2000.pdf (Genomics – oracle data bases designs )
· A Concordance to the Poems of Ben Jonson. Ohio University Press. 1978.(Co-Authored with Steven R. Bates) · A Concordance to the English Poems of Andrew Marvell. University of North Carolina Press. 1975.(Principal programmer and editorial and production assistant for the author, G. Guffey) · A Concordance to the Poems of Thomas Traherne. University of California Press. 1973.Principal programmer and editorial and production assistant for the author, G. Guffey · Featured Artist, Mid-2003, frequently from then; Featured Works many times @ artsig.com (orlovitz)– one of the largest peer-reviewed art galleries in the world – also well-reviewed and popular galleries at http://dofaust.deviantart.com, http://artin2007.deviantart.com, http://lightsourcee.deviiantart.com, http://ainsophaur2.deviantart.com · Standing invitation to The Florence Biennale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Biennale · Permanent collection, Shir Hadash congregation, Los Gatos California.