The data input for the entire Supplément has been completed. The current working version of the ARTFL Supplément implements a fast, flexible search engine!
What works:
- Searches for articles or groups of articles
by:- Article headword
- Author
- Category of knowledge (use an abbreviated form of the word for most complete results)
- Part of speech
These searches can be run in various combinations. Ex: Author = alembert and Category = astron
The user can also specify the type of textual object to search (in the "Type of Entry" box), including main articles (main), sub-articles (sub). To search the entire work, leave this box empty.
The search will produce a list of articles that fulfill the search criteria. Each article headword is configured as a hypertext link to the text of the article. All available information concerning Author, Category of knowledge and Part of speech is listed after the article headword (see below, concerning limitations of the identification procedures to date).
- Full-text searches
for:- words
- phrases
- co-occurrences of words
- word or phrase frequency per article
The user can search the entire Supplément, or search within a limited corpus as defined using the article search criteria. Ex: author = alembert, search articles for ge/ome/trique
Full text searches yield lists of passages from the Supplément with the targeted word or phrase in bold type. The result is given either as a "Concordance Report" (a passage of roughly five lines of text, currently the default) or as a "KWIC Report" (one line of text). For better contextualization, the user can then link to the paragraph, sub-article, article, or page in which the passage appears.
For co-occurrence searches, it is possible to specify whether the two terms should be located in the same sentence, paragraph, sub-article, or article.
"Frequency by Title" lists the number of occurrences for the search word or phrase in each article.
- Links to Articles in the Main Encyclopédie
Articles that begin with a § symbol are corrections or additions to similar articles in the main Encyclopédie. The headwords to these articles have been configured as hypertext links in the full-text interface. Clicking on these links will take open a new window and run a search for headword matches in the Encyclopédie. To retreive a full list of every linked article, type "sect" in the Head Word field of the search form and run a search.
Note: in many cases more than one headword will correspond to the link - e.g., clicking on the headword "HUMEUR" will find not only the Encyclopédie article "HUMEUR" but also the sub-articles "Humeur", "Humeurs animales", "Corruption des humeurs", etc.
- Links to digitized images of each page of the text
These images are accessed by clicking on the page number that appears at the top of individual pages of text and at the beginning of each article or sub-article.
What does not work:
- References to the plates from the main text
The 5th volume of the Supplément, containing the Plates and Plate Legends, has not yet undergone the process of data capture. We expect to have both the Plates and their legends available in the near future.
- Cross-references from one article to another
These links will be established primarily by hand at a later date. This will be one of the last steps in the project.
Editorial Concerns
Limitations in the Identification of Textual Elements
It may be helpful for users to know that, up to this point, all identifications--articles, authors, cross-references, etc.-- have been made using automated procedures based on typographical patterns. For example, large upper case letters indicate articles, small upper case letters indicate sub-articles, a single upper-case letter in parentheses at the end of a paragraph furnishes the authorship information; cross-references require somewhat more complicated patterns, but the idea is the same. Our reliance on these patterns is absolutely necessary since the Supplément is such a large work. At the same time, these procedures mean that irregularities in the patterns we have used may cause problems.
It should be clear from this description that some elements of the Supplément will escape automated detection. For example, author attributions that are not indicated by the special author codes are less easy to detect. We have attempted to identify many of the indications such as, "This Article is by X", for example, but some may have escaped our efforts. In many cases, we will have to insert information by hand--a step that will come much later in our development process.
Errors in the Text
We are aware that some typographical errors have been introduced into the text during our data capture procedures. Unfortunately, due to the large dimensions of the Supplément and its great semantic diversity, it is difficult to correct these errors by any normal spell-checking procedure. We have begun to make some changes to rectify high-frequency errors, but this is a process that will continue for some time.
In addition, the text includes a certain number (5,500) of $ symbols which designate an unreadable character or symbol that was not keyed during the data capture process. Users will also encounter many <omit type=x> tags which indicate tables, formulae, symbols, etc. that are difficult to represent digitally. In these cases the corresponding page images should be consulted.
We apologize for these lapses in the text, but we have provided digitized images of the original text in order to permit readers to check the machine-readable version. When questions arise, users should consult these images, by first obtaining the individual page or article in machine-readable form and then clicking on the page and volume identifier at the beginning.
A user reports that pages 164 and 165 in volume 2, the article on CANADA, are missing.