Important! See our discussion of ARTFL conventions for accents, pattern matching, and context searching!
The thematic index was compiled by the editors of one of the eighteenth-century editions. It is prefaced by the following notice:
"L'Auteur n'aiant pu travailler à cette Table, elle a été donnée à faire à une personne très--habile; mais de peur qu'on ne la fît trop longue sans nécessité, on y a mis rarement ce qui apartient aux matieres dans leurs propres Articles: par exemple, presque tout ce que l'on a marqué de César dans cette Table se trouve ailleurs que dans l' Article de CESAR."Pour l'usage de cette Table il faut remarquer, que le Chifre Romain indique le Tome, & l'Arabe la page. Lorsque le chifre est seul il indique le Texte, & lorsqu'il est suivi de la lettre a, ou b, il indique la prémiere ou la seconde colonne des Remarques; & si l'on y ajoûte la lettre n, on indique quelque Note marginale de la même colonne."
Use these accent representations only in the "Search Articles for" box:Pattern MatchingCapital vowel = match all accents. Example E --> é ê è and no accent. grave = back slash. Example: à --> a\ aigu = forward slash. Example: é --> e/ circonflexe = caret. Example: ê --> e^ cedille = comma. Example ç --> c, trema = double quote. Example ö --> o"
Pattern matching allows identification of a large number of words corresponding to a defined pattern. The search term fem.* will result in all of the words that begin with fem. Similarly, the expression c.*ions specifies all of the words beginning with c and ending in ions (ex: champions, créations, etc.).The most commonly used regular expression operators are:
. (period) -- matches any single character; .* (period asterisk) -- matches any string of characters; E (capital vowel) -- match all accented and non-accented forms; | (veritical line) -- or: femme|homme [a-z] -- matches a single character found in the specified range;
Apostrophes
For the purposes of searching, most apostrophes are treated as word separators. Thus, to search for l'Europe, the user must enter
l' europe
(the two elements separated by a space), and select the "Consecutive Words" search context. For certain exceptions, however, the apostrophe is considered to be an integral part of one word, ex:
aujourd'hui
can be found with a simple word search.
Search Context: Consecutive Words, Sentence, Paragraph
You may enter one or more words for searching. It is important to note that the vertical line (|) serves as the logical OR operator and the space or carriage return serves as the logical AND operator. Thus,Report Format: Concordance and KWIC reports, Frequency by Title
femme|homme
will search for either femme OR homme.
By contrast, entering
femme homme
will find occurences of femme AND homme.By default, ARTFL will search for co-occurences within the same sentence. Clicking on the Consecutive Words button will restrict the search to adjacent words. Thus, by default, searching for belle femme will find all sentences containing both belle AND femme, not necessarily in that order or in proximity to one another.
When the "Consecutive Words" option is selected, the search will only retrieve the words in the specified order, as in the phrase belle femme. Criteria may be combined, as in:
belle|beau|belles|beaux homme.*|femme.*
which will search for the adjective AND words beginning with homme or femme.Users may also designate that the search context be expanded by selecting Paragraph.
The user may select one of two Report Formats. In both the Concordance format (approximately five lines of text) and Key-Word-In-Context or KWIC format (one line of text),the results are posted in list form, preceded by an indication of the number of texts searched, the terms searched for in the corpus, and the number of total occurences. Following this general information is a list of occurrences. Each occurence is represented by a short citation, containing the title of the article or sub-article and the page number on which the word in question occurs. The page number and the title are linked to the corresponding textual units, which allow the user to retrieve the full text of the article or page, with the first keyword highlighted, as required. In both formats, the search term appears in bold type.Be aware that broadly defined full-text searches may produces thousands of results. The result file, in such a case will take a long time to download (much less to read!) and may exceed the memory capacity of the Web browser. Defining the search criteria more narrowly will produce fewer results and facilitate analysis.
The Frenquency by Title option lists the number of occurrences of the search term in each main article. The report will list all articles within the corpus that contain the word or phrase.