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This screencast demonstrates the word index function of the
Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership -
EEBO - TCP.
Hosted by The University of Michigan Library.
In order to successfully use the word index, you need to be aware
that the EEBO - TCP project is divided into two phases.
You can't search both phases at once, so in order to get a full set of results,
you will need to search the word index once in phase one,
and once in phase two.
Ok, let's get started!
We'll do our search in phase one of the word index, because it works the same in each phase.
So, what I do in phase one you can repeat easily in phase two.
Let's try this search using the word happily, spelled H-A-P-P-I-L-Y.
Happily is a good word to search for
because words that, today, would be spelled with an ending -ly
used to be subject to very irregular spelling.
As you can see, many of the results we get are just variations on our search word.
What the word index does, is help to compensate for the fact that our search engine
cannot match variant spelling.
The idea is that the word index will help you to locate
and automatically search for variations on a word or word stem at the same time.
If you search for a word or words stem, the index will show it to you
as well as the fourteen nearest surrounding terms in the alphabet.
You can also scroll up or down through the alphabet,
but only fifteen terms will appear on the screen at any given time.
You'll notice here that our spelling of happily
occurs 14,790 times in phase one alone.
While happily, H-A-P-P-I-L-L-Y, has three occurrences
and happillie, H-A-P-P-I-L-L-I-E, has only one.
This indicates that our spelling is very common in these texts
and it also provides us with some variant options.
So let's say were interested in seeing where these variant options occur.
All we need to do is select as many of the variants as we want to check
and then click on "search for selected terms".
Next, we're taken to a page with links to the text in which our selected variant spellings occur.
While this tool maybe useful, especially in cases where
you have words that contain letters often interchanged in early printing,
it does have its limitations. And in some cases you may have to move pretty far
through the alphabet to find the corresponding term you're looking for.
Furthermore, it doesn't deal well with word variations
involving the first letter in a word such as under, spelled U-N-D-E-R,
that would sometimes have been spelled using a "V" instead of a "U".
This concludes our overview of the word index,
but if you're interested in learning more about searching and browsing within the EEBO - TCP database
you can check out our other screencasts for information about how to do more detailed searches
or how to take your search results and best utilize them for your research.