Sidney Duane Orr

Sidney Duane Orr

http://dofaust.deviantart.com

Born and raised in Southern California, this man's father was a prominent Pacific Coast League umpire, Henry "Pat" Orr. And, his uncle was Gil Orlovitz, a prominent and prolific poet/novelist/playwright.

Orr studied widely in the humanities; completed a B.A. at UCLA in 1970, and nearly completed an M.A. (Ezra Pound & Imagism) in English Literature at California State University, Dominguez Hills, pursued further graduate studies at UCLA, concentrating on scholarly tools (concordances), linguistics, computer science, modern poetry, and Elizabethan literature (Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne).

In literary scholarship, Orr was a research student in The University Of California John Dryden project, under the guidance of Vinton Dearing, and assisted in textual analysis of several Dryden texts, at the William Andrews Clark Library, in the early 1970s. In the same time frame, Orr was the principal assistant to Professor John Guffey in the preparation of A Concordance To The English Poems Of Andrew Marvell, and of A Concordance To The English Poems Of Thomas Traherne. Later, Orr was the co-principal investigator of A Concordance To The Poems Of Ben Jonson.

Orr has some knowledge of German, French, Spanish, Attic and Modern Greek, and Hebrew. ( - and claims - 2021 - to still be studying Hebrew, German, and French.)

Orr 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 - 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, or a proto-concordance on thousands of slips of paper. Mr Orr is pleasantly surprised that as a devotee of textual-analysis, a field virtually-founded by Professor Dearing, He finds himself at the forefront of the emerging disciplines of Data Science, and one of very few data-scientists to have produced transparent and self-explanatory enduring-tools for scholars. Concordances are completely unhampered by jargon, politics, or unscholarly agendas.

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; and often, claiming "copyright" of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century books. Scholars who assemble and edit a complete edition of a author's work, are meticulous, and who use the best, most canonical editions. These are the editions which concordance-makers seek to process with computing tools, for concordances and other scholarly tools.

Orr 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 - i.e., virtually simultaneously. 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 - usually referred to as an "rDBMS".

The reviewing process Mr Orr's code accomplished was done in real time, in the late 1980's, and he copyrighted a reviewing computer program's code of his own making, which was called an Inspection-Review-System about 1989. The program managed a base source text, and, additions or modification being made by the operator, and merged the latter into the former, to present an elegant display of the base text, and subsequent edits. Reluctant to apply for a patent, since such a process had traditionally not been considered patent-able at the time, 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 the functionality in his computer program. The degree to which a scripted process can be considered a patent-able thing remains an issue in the realm of Intellectual Property.

Orr is an amateur musician, who played the piano, and studied musical theory, composition, ethnomusicology and the Santoor, gave piano recitals though his teenage years, and competed in national competitions of The National Guild Of Piano Teachers 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.

Orr 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: http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Saccharomyces/nar2000.pdf

This user's ancestors were professional athletes, writers, poets, rabbis, farmers, horse traders, and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry. Orr is a nephew of Gil Orlovitz, a prominent writer in the US and UK in the latter half of the 20th century.

A resume: https://sidneyorr.wordpress.com/

Publications, Recognition

http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/1/77.short Integrating functional genomic information into the Saccharomyces Genome Database 76.9.82.243 (talk) 05:31, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

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 the following art Sites:

http://dofaust.deviantart.com http://lightsource.deviantart.com http://ainsophaur2.deviantart.com http://www.artwanted.com/artist.cfm?ArtID=16892

Standing invitation to The Florence Biennale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Biennale

Permanent collection, Shir Hadash, Los Gatos California.