ELECTRONIC SEARCH

About the texts

Here is the list of texts which, as of May 2010, can be searched electronically :

• Super Porphyrium De V universalibus (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De praedicamentis (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De sex principiis (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• Liber divisionum (ed. de Loë, 1913)
• Peri hermeneias (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• Analytica priora (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• Analytica posteriora (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• Topica (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De sophisticis elenchis (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• Mineralia (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De nutrimento et nutribili (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De sensu et sensato (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De memoria et reminiscentia (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De intellectu et intelligibili (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De somno et vigilia (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De spiritu et respiratione (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De motibus animalium (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De iuventute et senectute (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De morte et vita (ed. Borgnet, 1890)
• De vegetabilibus (ed. Meyer-Jessen, 1867)
• De animalibus (ed. Stadler, 1916-1920)
• Ethica (ed. Borgnet, 1891)
• Politica (ed. Borgnet, 1891)
• Super I Sententiarum (ed. Borgnet, 1893)
• Super II Sententiarum (ed. Borgnet, 1894)
• Super III Sententiarum (ed. Borgnet, 1894)
• Super IV Sententiarum (ed. Borgnet, 1894)

Please note that Super Porphyrium De V universalibus, De sex principiis et Liber divisionum have been edited in the Editio Coloniensis, which offers more reliable versions of the texts than the Borgnet edition. The first criterion used in determining what texts to digitize and incorporate into this site remains the fact that a given text has not yet been edited by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut. (Since those responsible for the new critical edition have already let it be known that they intend to one day publish a CD-ROM containing an electronic version of all the writings that have been edited so far, one hopes that when that hypothetical CD becomes available scholars will be able to use both that CD and the present website so as to have electronic access to the greatest possible number of Albert’s writings.) The presence within that list of texts which the Institut has already published is to be explained by a variety of reasons : De sex principiis and Liber divisionum had already been digitized for this website when the Institut published them, and Super Porphyrium De V universalibus was digitized so as to enable searches through the entirety of Albert’s corpus of works on logic. Even when other treatises from the list become available in the Editio Coloniensis, they will not be removed. (One can modify the settings of the search engine so as to choose which texts will or will not be searched.)

The electronic version of the above-mentioned texts to which the search engine gives access are different from their printed version in a certain number of respects :

1. Albert frequently refers to Greek words, which the medieval manuscript tradition modifies more or less and which he always writes in Roman letters, but which Borgnet (usually, but not always) decided to « turn back » into Greek letters. In order to simplify and facilitate electronic searches, those words in Greek characters have been romanized. (The system of translitteration used is that of the Perseus project.) Those romanized Greek words are displayed in purple in the passages identified by the search engine.
2. Also in order to simplify the digitization and electronic searches, the ligatures æ et œ have been replaced by ae and oe. Italics and boldfaced script have also been eliminated.
3. Albert’s works contain a small number of illustrations, which in their digitized version have been replaced by the mention [ILLUSTRATION]. One can use the printed versions or the image files of these available on this site in order to view a given illustration itself.
4. All printed editions contain typographical errors, and the same is true of the texts that were digitized for this website. Since those errors can sometimes constitute annoying obstacles to an electronic search, the most obvious of them that were identified during the digitization process have been corrected. In the search results produced by the engine, faulty forms are in red and corrected ones, in green. Since producing new editions, strictly speaking, has never been part of the Alberti Magni E-Corpus project, corrections extend only to errors that are unambiguously mere typos. One can also consult the whole list of those corrections, which are almost always confirmed by the 1651 Lyon edition of Albert’s works, here.
5. Digitizing editions from the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th is a difficult task which itself introduces errors. Many of them have been eliminated when the texts were revised, but it is unavoidable that many more remain. The user of the search engine should keep in mind that the present website is being built with very limited financial resources and that the revision of the texts is therefore not done as extensively as would be ideal. In most cases, each image file was turned into a readable text by an undergraduate student with some Latin and the software OmniPagePro, and then quickly proofread again, without any systematic comparison with the printed text, by a more experienced reader. Among the most common mistakes produced by digitization, the following should be noted especially :
1.  u instead of n, and n instead u;
2. I instead of l, and l instead of I;
3. b instead of h, and h instead of b;
4. c instead of e, and e instead of c;
5. m instead of rn, et rn instead of m;
6. additional e in words (mainly where the printed text had a caesura);
7. ae turned into a or e;
8. missing words;
9. paragraphs that are unduely divided in 2.

Users who identify any remaining errors would do a great service to the project by letting Bruno Tremblay know. (See the section CONTACT in the main menu.)
The main goal of the transformation of image files into readable texts, at least as far as this website is concerned, is to allow electronic searches. One would be well advised, before using the passages identified by the search engine in scholarly articles, to double-check with the printed edition or the image files that can be downloaded elsewhere on this site.

Features of the search engine

The search engine is a modified version of the one which was originally developed by the University of Waterloo for the Electronic Oxford English Dictionary (EOED) and which was later adapted in order to suit the needs of the MARGOT project. Using it is relatively simple and a few minutes will normally suffice for the average user to get accustomed to its features and take advantage of its capabilities.

Word(s) or phrase(s) to be searched
The main features of the engine, which allow for boolean searching, are the following :

1. an AND operator, which is represented by the plus sign : +
2. an OR operator, which more precisely means AND/OR and which is represented by the straight slash bar : |
3. a NOT operator, which is represented by the minus sign : -
4. the use of quotation marks (more precisely : straight quotation marks)  in order to look for a phrase instead of a word : " "  
5. the use of brackets in order to establish a certain hierarchy within a given search : ( )
6. by default, spaces are irrelevant unless they are enclosed within brackets (i.e., the spaces then become part of what is searched when quotation marks are used), which means that by default the search engine looks for words that are or contain the searched word, but one can use quotation marks and spaces to make sure the engine only finds words that are exactly the same as the searched word (in other words, the combination space-word-space, when placed between quotation marks, is interpreted by the engine as being equivalent to a phrase);

The search engine does not allow the use of wild cards (yet), although the use of quotations marks and spacing may partly (but not completely) compensate for that absence. It is planned that one day the engine will make no difference between u and v, between i and j and between e and ë, but for now the user will unfortunately have to take into account the orthographical peculiarities of the different digitized editions. (De animalibus presents special difficulties in this respect, as the edition that was scanned follows a bit more closely some of the spelling variations coming from the original manuscript itself. The user of the search engine must know that the same word can be spelled in different ways throughout the work — sometimes in the same paragraph —, and since those variations are not typos they were not «corrected».) Most texts come from the Borgnet edition, which always distinguishes between u and v, between i and j and which does not normally use umlauts. Things become more complicated with Liber divisionum, which for instance uses eius and not ejus, or with De vegetabilibus, which uses aër and not aer, and aloës instead of aloes.

Here are a few examples of searches that can be performed thanks to the engine and the results they will yield:

1. scientia : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus that includes the word scientia or words that contain that string of 8 letters (e.g., praescientia, scientias, scientiarum, etc.);
2. " scientia " : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus that includes the word scientia;
3. " scientia" : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus that includes the word scientia or words that begin with that string of letters (e.g., scientias, scientiarum, etc.);
4. "scientia " : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus that include the word scientia or words that end with that string of letters (e.g., praescientia) 
5. scientia+logica : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that include both the words scientia (or any word that contain that string of letters, e.g., praescientia or scientias) and logica (or any word that contains that string of letters, e..g., logicarum);
6. scientia+" logica " : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that include one word that contains or is the same as scientia and one word that is the same as logica;
7. scientia-logica : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that includes one word that contains or is the same as scientia but that excludes any word that contains or is the same as logica;
8. " scientia"|logica : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that includes one word that begins with, or is the same as, scientia, and/or one word that contains or is the same as logica;
9. " scientias logicas "-Avicenna : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that includes the exact phrase scientias logicas and that excludes any word that contains or is the same as Avicenna (e.g., Avicennae);
10. (" scientia "+ " logica ")-(rhetorica|dialectica) : will retrieve every passage from the selected corpus and within the context one chooses (e.g., sentence or paragraph) that includes one word that is the same as scientia and one word that is the same as logica and that excludes any word that contains or is the same as rhetorica and/or any word that contains or is the same as dialectica.

Search format
This allows the user to determine the textual unit in which the search is performed (and therefore also the context in which each match is to be initially displayed on the results page). This choice is especially important if more than one word or phrase is to be taken into account in the search.  The options are :

1. title only : matches will be searched in titles ONLY;
2. sentence : matches will be searched in each sentence (please note that a sentence is defined as any group of words coming after a period or a question mark and ending with a period or a question mark, which once in a while will create strange results since periods and question marks can sometimes be found within sentences), which includes titles;
3. paragraph : matches will be searched within each paragraph (a paragraph is defined as any group of words coming after a carriage return and ending with a carriage return), which includes titles;
4. column : matches will be searched within in column (please note that not all texts are divided into columns), which includes titles;
5. page : matches will be searched in each page, which includes titles;
6. entire caput : matches will be searched within each caput (please note that not all texts are divided into chapters), which includes titles;
7. entire tractatus : matches will be searched within each tractatus (please note that not all texts are divided into treatises), which includes titles;
8. entire liber : matches will be searched within each liber (please note that not all texts are divided into books), which includes titles.

The most practical and universal options are probably paragraph and page.

Using which stylesheet?
Four stylesheets are available, although only the first two are likely to be of any interest to most users :

1. Unedited : presents the text as found in the printed version (except for Greek characters, which are always translitterated into purple Roman letters), including typographical errors (marked in red);
2. Edited : same as above, except that typographical errors have been corrected (corrected words are in green);
3. Standard : displays text with a minimal amount of manual « tagging »;
4. Show tags : displays the XML tagging automatically added to the text so it can be searched by the engine.

Corpus
The user can search the whole corpus by choosing « All Texts » (choice by default) or manually select the individual work(s) they are interested in.  

Number of matches to display
The user can decide how many matches will be displayed on a page of results. The default number is set at 10.

Continuing from which match
This allows the user to determine where the list of displayed results will start : the first that was found, the fifth, the sixteenth, etc. By default, the first result that was found will also be the first to be displayed.

Begin a search