What Can Be Searched for?

The Research view is shown in the following picture, together with some example values filled in the form.

Figure: Research view

The form is separated into 3 areas: the text area, the metadata area and the refine area. These will be described in turn.

Text Area

This area is labelled Search for...

Text input field

Here you can specify one or more words to be searched for. If searching for several words , they are to be separated by blank space and will be joined by AND, i.e. all words have to occur in the document. Wildcards are allowed, e.g. the term "Mess*" will find all words starting with "Mess" such as "Messer", "Messers", "messen", "Messias", or "Messung".

KWIC

Check this box if you would like to see your results in the KWIC format ( Key Word In Context). The search term then will be highlighted as in the following figure.

Figure: KWIC search results

As the term can occur several times in a document and in several XPaths (the structural location within an XML document), the KWIC entries will be shown as indirect children of the title node. This means the nodes have to be expanded in order to reveal the KWICs. Either directly flip open the document in question or use the Expand Button twice until the KWICs appear.

Metadata Area

This area is labelled In objects having... Whereas the Text Area looks at the contents of a document, the Metadata Area can be used for all TextGrid objects, as every object in TextGrid has its set of metadata.

The Person field

This corresponds to the agent tag in the metadata. Specify a name or part of the name of the persons (or institutions) which play a role in creation, edition, transcription etc. of the document.

The Title field

This corresponds to the title tag in the metadata. Specify substrings of the title of the documents you are looking for.

The Project field

This corresponds to the project tag in the metadata. There are two ways of naming a project: either with parts of its display name, or with its name known by Tg-Auth*, e.g. TGPR123. The latter string can be found in the users and project management perspective.

The Text Genre field

This corresponds to the type tag in the metadata, and could be e.g. "dictionary" or "prose". If you are unsure about the available genres, type some letter(s) and wait a moment to see a suggestion of the existing genres that contain these letter(s).

Refine Area

This area is labelled Refine search...

The Baseline Elements field

Every TEI document - like dictionaries, drama, letters, critical editions, or language corpora - is represented twice in the TextGridRep:

Once in its original encoding with possibly document-specific TEI tags, and
once in the TextGrid baseline encoding, which defines a subset of common elements for each text type.

When uploaded into the TextGridRep, every TEI document refers to an adapter that will be used by Tg-Crud to map from the original encoding to the baseline encoding. Thus the researcher does not need to know about document-specific encodings when specifying a structural search.

The elements of the baseline encoding can be entered into this field, e.g. "p", "div", or "head". The semantics of this is: when some tag was given in this field, then the text specified in the Text Area must occur within this tag in the document's baseline encoding. Thus entering something in here without giving a search term in the text area is not intended and will keep the search from starting.

The Show At Once field

You can specify whether you want all results at once or in successive portions of a fixed size. In the first case, use the string "all" as in the default configuration. In the latter case, type in a number to specify the size of the desired portion, e.g. 10.

This field is there for performance reasons: If you expect your search result to be numerous, the TextGridLab tends to slow down. Specifying a portion of e.g. 50 will remedy this.

How to search?

Just click the button at the bottom of the Research view labelled "Start new search". Remember that this can take some time if the search result is large. The specified fields will be joined by AND, which means that every condition (e.g. text, title, AND genre, if those three fields are filled in) must be met.