General User Documentation for PhiloLogic
1. Introduction
2. Searching the Bibliography
2.1 Bibliographic Fields
2.2 Retrieving and Navigating Documents
3. Character Representation for Search Terms
3.1 Accents and Special Characters
3.2 Wildcard Characters and Boolean Operators
3.3 Punctuation Marks and Searching
4. Selecting a Search Option
4.1 Single Term and Phrase Search (Default)
4.2 Proximity Searching in the Same Sentence or Paragraph
5. Selecting a Results Format
5.1. Concordance Report (300 characters plus)
5.2. KWIC Report (a single line of text)
5.3. Frequency by Title
5.4. Navigating Documents from Word Searches
6. Getting More Help
Database-Specific Searching Tips
Bibliographic Searching:
Author and Title: When entering authors or titles, punctuation and spacing must match exactly that in the on-line bibliography.
Date: The works in the database currently range in date of publication from 1818 to 1912.
Theme: To limit one's search to a particular theme, simply enter the theme into the Theme Field. One may search more than one theme at a time; the vertical bar ( | ) serves as the OR operator (e.g., entering Law and Society|Economic Development searches both).Genre: To limit one's search to a particular genre, simply enter the genre into the Genre Field. One may search more than one genre at a time; the vertical bar ( | ) serves as the OR operator (e.g., entering memoir|letter searches both).
- African-Americans
- Economic Development
- Frontier Settlement
- Law and Society
- Native American Relations
- Political Development
- Religion and Culture
- Women and Gender
- Campaign of 1858
- Lincoln
- Presidential Campaigns
- Black Hawk War
- autobiography
- biography
- diary
- fiction
- government document
- interview
- letter
- memoir
- narrative
- poetry
- proceedings
- sermon
- speech
- song
- travelogue
Orthographic Considerations:
No unusual orthography has been detected in this database. Expect elisions such as wing'd and 'neath. Both British and American spellings of words have been entered (e.g., honour and honor). Wildcard characters or Boolean operators can help detect such inconsistencies. One could enter wing.d or hono.?r or honor|honour to achieve the desired results.
Data-Entry Idiosyncrasies:
Several data errors have been detected in some databases either from typesetting errors in the original source or from rekeying/OCRing the documents. One should avoid making arguments from silence. In particular, look out for the transposition or doubling of letters, similar letters (e.g., thc) or word-clustering.
Punctuation and Full-Text Searching
Hyphens: Hypens act as word separators. Thus, one should treat hypenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g. if searching for ever-changing, type in ever changing.)
Apostrophes: One must include apostrophes when searching words with apostrophes in them (e.g., only by typing god's will one find "God's"). In this database apostrophes do not act as word separators. Therefore contractions and elisions must be entered without spaces before or after the apostrophe.
Ampersands: The ampersand (&) is not a searchable character. Avoid Phrase Searches where an ampersand may be used as a conjunction.
Formatting and Display
Character Display:
Notes: There are notes throughout the database. In PhiloLogic notes never interfere when searching the text to which they refer. Note references are linked to notes and text from notes are linked to page references.
Images: There are several images throughout the database. Most are displayed as inline images once the user pulls up any level of context (e.g., page, paragraph, h3, h2, and h1), but not from a first-level results screen.Please check the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project Text Database errata page for the most current information on problems regarding the database or its PhiloLogic implementation.
Please direct comments or queries about this service to ets@lib.uchicago.edu.For questions or comments concerning the Project please contact:
Drew E. VandeCreek, Director, Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
Founders Memorial Library, Northern Illinois University
drew@niu.edu