Author: For a general instructions on how to formulate an author search, please consult the PhiloLogic User Documentation. Users of the OVI database should also note the following database-specific requirements when formulating an author search:
Title: For a general instructions on how to formulate a title search, please consult the PhiloLogic User Documentation. Users of the OVI database may also wish to consult the OVI Bibliography to verify the exact form in which a given title appears.
Date: Use this field to specify texts to be included in the search according to the year of composition assigned to them by the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano. For example, entering 1265-1321 selects all texts assigned composition dates between these years. In addition to year ranges, you may limit the corpus to works composed in any individual year. For example, entering 1325 will select any works that have 1325 as their assigned date (but note that you cannot select multiple individual years by placing a comma between years; instead specify a range or conduct multiple searches). The OVI database includes documents dating from the ninth century though the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the majority of documents dated between 1200-1400.
The Opera del Vocabolario Italiano uses a complex scheme for assigning date codes to individual documents in order to describe as precisely as possible the state of knowledge regarding when the document was composed. For example, in some cases, the precise year of composition may be known, in other cases, it may be known that a document was definitely composed after a certain date but only probably before another date, etc. Unfortunately, it has thus far not been possible to take advantage of the richness of the OVI coding scheme for search purposes. Instead, the ItalNet implementation of the OVI database considers only the latest possible composition date assigned to a document when restricting the corpus by date or date range.
For example, the OVI has assigned the interval 1270-1300 as the probable dates of composition of Guido Cavalcanti's Rime. In this case the last year (1300) has been used by ItalNet for coding the document for search purposes. Thus, if one enters 1300 or a range such as 1299-1301 in the date field, the search results will include Cavalcante's Rime, but if one were to enter 1270 or 1265-1275 in the date field, the search results would not include this work.
Because of this search limitation, users are advised to consult the OVI Bibliography to verify which year ItalNet has assigned a given document for inclusion in date searches. Furthermore, users may wish to restrict the corpus by period rather than date in order to include a wider range of documents in the search corpus.
Period: Due to the limitations of date/date range searching discussed above, users may opt to search by period instead. In addition to assigning documents to specific years or year intervals, ItalNet has also used the OVI-supplied date codes to assign documents to one or more half-century periods indicated by the two-digit century followed by the letter a for the first half of the century or the letter b for the second half.
For example, to search texts composed in the first half of the thirteenth century, use 13a. To seach texts composed in the second half of that century, use 13b. Some texts will be appear in searches from more than one century. For example, Meo dei Tolomei's A nnulla guisa me posso soffrire/caribo/ has been assigned the date range 1291-1310 as the years of its composition. Thus, it will appear in period searches 13b and also 14a.
To search a period greater than 50 years, select all periods that apply. For example, selecting 13a,13b [note: no space after comma] will search all texts from the thirteenth century.
The user should note that a century begins with the year xx01. For example, the first year of the 14th century is 1301, not 1300, which is reckoned as the last year of the 13th century. However, if the date assigned to the text is an approximate date (i.e., circa 1300), then the text will be included from the subsequent half-century as well as its proper one (i.e., 1301-1350 as well as 1251-1300).
Specific and General Areas: Use this field to select texts according to the specific or general area of their origin. Both a general linguistic area (General Area), which usually corresponds to a geographic region in Italy (tosc. = toscano), and a specific linguistic area (Specific Area), which when possible coincides with the name of a city or town (fior. = fiorentino; sang. = sangimignanese) have been specified in the bibliographic data for each text in the database.
If there is insufficient data to attribute a specific linguistic type associated with a city or town, the Specific Area field simply repeats the data in the General Area field. For example, including tosc as the General Area results in a search for all Tuscan texts (264). On the other hand, including fior as the Specific Area results in a search for only Fiorentine texts (102). Yet, including tosc as the Specific Area searches for all Tuscan texts that were not able to be attributed to any specific Tuscan city or town (101).
In the bibliographic data for the Specific Area field one will occasionally find the following combined notations:
These combined notations cannot be searched directly (e.g., one cannot enter A>B in the Specific Area field), but searching on either part of a combined notation will return documents that include that part in a combined notation (e.g. searching for A will return all instances of A A>B A-B etc.)
The collocation of the texts in specific and general linguistic areas is quite complex and the field contains more than one hundred general and specific linguistic areas. To determine which abbreviation(s) to include in your search, please consult:
Form: Use the single-letter abbreviations below to specify the following document forms: V = verse, P = prose, M = mixed (i.e., verse and prose). To specify more than one document form, include the vertical bar ( | ) "OR" operator between abbreviations; for example: V|P. Note that appropriate codes may be entered into both the "form" and "type" fields to obtain further precision; for example to restrict the search corpus to prose vulgarizations, enter P in the form field and V in the type field.
Type: Use the single-letter abbreviations below to specify the following document types: O = original, P = paraphrase, V = vulgarization, M = mixed (i.e.,original and vulgarization), T = translation . To specify more than one document form, include the vertical bar ( | ) "OR" operator between abbreviations; for example: P|T. Note that appropriate codes may be entered into both the "form" and "type" fields to obtain further precision; for example to restrict the search corpus to prose vulgarizations, enter P in the form field and V in the type field.
Genre: The Opera del Vocabolario has classified all documents in the database according to 22 genre categories. Please consult the table below for a complete list of these categories and their corresponding abbreviations. Note that these abbreviations must be entered exactly as the appear in the table (see the table for instructions and examples).
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Keyword Searching
For a general instructions on formulating keyword search, please consult the
PhiloLogic User Documentation.
In addition to this general documentation, users of the OVI database should note the following points:
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Search Options
For a general instructions on search options and document navigation please consult the PhiloLogic User Documentation. In the ItalNet implementation of the OVI database, the paragraph option for proximity searches has been disabled. Likewise, document navigation links in the search results displays for document headings and other organic textual references have been disabled due to copyright considerations. Nevertheless, users may view an entire page of a document by clicking on the page number links in the search results display.
Please consult the OVI errata page for the most current information on problems regarding the OVI database or its PhiloLogic implementation. If you encounter any problems that have not been previously reported, please write to mark@barkov.uchicago.edu.