The The Humanities Digital Information Service
offers a growing number
of research-quality, fully-indexed humanities texts
and a search interface
that allows a wide variety of simple and complex queries.
Click on a button (or on either side of a button with two choices indicated)
to access the particular function indicated.
The most common of these are:
Help offers help for all of the features on the current page.
Bookshelf takes you to a list of available databases.
Other Searches offers the
entire suite of search options available for a particular database.
The Outline button expands (+) or contracts (-)
the entire Table of Contents to the next level.
The Browse button expands the next (or previous) Table of Contents
item, or brings up the next
(or previous) text element in the Table of Contents.
Enter in the Search Form the word or phrase you wish to search
for
Note that if you enter a word not followed by a space, then
it will be treated as a prefix (i.e., searching for the word "sun" will return all occurrences
of the word "sun,"
as well as "suns," "sunny," "sunken," "sundry,"
etc.).
If the word or phrase is followed by a space, then only
occurences of precisely that word
(or of phrases ending with precisely the final word of the search
phrase) will be returned.
Choose a restricted ("Within
entire database") or non-restricted ("Within checked items") search.
Click on the Search button
Note that the Book Bag
normally contains only the phrase "The Book bag is empty"
until after a text selection is made.
Expandable Tables of Contents appear in various forms throughout the search
facility.
Use these buttons to navigate a Table of Contents:
Up-arrow icons: click to go to the indicated level of the database
structure.
Open folder
icons and checkboxes: click on the checkbox to restrict
your search to this item.
This icon represents the "container" of the item(s) listed next in the
Table of Contents.
Closed folder icons and checkboxes: click on the checkbox to
restrict your search to this item,
or on the icon itself to reveal the contents of the item.
Text icons and checkboxes: click on the checkbox to restrict
your search to this item,
or on the icon itself to read (browse) this text.
This icon represents the lowest-level structural item in the database,
that is, a piece of text. It cannot be expanded further.
The Browse button on any Navigation Bar
expands the next (or previous) Table of Contents item,
or brings up the next (or previous) text element in the Table of Contents.
Databases: Texts are grouped into large generic or thematic
databases,
for example, African-American
Poetry and English
Prose Drama,
into databases of the works of some individual authors,
or into occasional special databases of readings for specific courses.
See the complete list of HDIS databases
here.
This list is also available by clicking on the Bookshelf button
of the search application's Navigation Bar.
In the present implementation, it is only possible to search within a
single database;
databases cannot be combined for searching.
Individual Authors and Titles can be found by various means:
Expand the Table of Contents items within a
database which covers an appropriate time period and genre.
Note that these lists do not provide direct links to individual
texts or authors
within the searchable database; you must still go to that database
and use its Table of Contents
to search or browse the texts themselves.
Explore the detailed author-title list of what's
available through HDIS.
Open folder
icons and checkboxes: click on the checkbox to