t with sorrow that I write that Robert Jay Glickman recently passed away. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. His area was Hispanic language, literature, and culture, but he was also an early innovator in humanities computing. He published the manual for a text analysis program PRORA he developed with G. J. Staalman in 1966. This was reviewed in the first issue of Computers in the Humanities. (Lieberman, D. (1966). "Review of Manual for the Printing of Literary Texts by Computer by Robert Jay Glickman and Gerrit Joseph Staalman." Computers and the Humanities 1(1): 12.)
The University of Toronto has an obituary at:
They also have a web site with links to some of his publications including the PRORA manual:
Two humanities computing references for those interested along with a quote:
Glickman, R. J. (1965). An Integrated Series Of Computing Programs For Literary Research. MLA Conference 16.
Glickman, R. J. and G. J. Staalman (1966). Manual for the Printing of Literary Texts and Concordances by Computer. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
"PRORA is a series of computer programs designed primarily for scholarswho work in the fields of literature and linguistics; who have little orno knowledge of how computers operate, but who would utilize computer technologyif it were possible to do so without sacrificing their own researchtime in order to learn the details of computer science." p. 1-------------------------------------In sorrow,
Geoffrey Rockwell (He/him)
Philosophy and Digital Humanities
University of Alberta