• 1. INTRODUCTION
  • 1.1 INTRODUCTION
  • 1.2 UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE OF THE DATABASE
  • 1.3 SEARCH NAVIGATION BAR
  • 1.4 TABLE OF CONTENTS NAVIGATION BAR
  • 1.5 NOTES ON MARK-UP CONVENTIONS
  • 1.6 ABOUT THE SEARCH SOFTWARE
• 2. FINDING TOOLS
  • 2.1 FIND AUTHORS
  • 2.2 FIND PLAYS
  • 2.3 FIND SCENES
  • 2.4 FIND CHARACTERS
  • 2.5 FIND THEATERS
  • 2.6 FIND PRODUCTIONS
  • 2.7 FIND RESOURCES
• 3. SEARCHING
  • 3.1 SEARCH OVERVIEW
  • 3.2 FULL-TEXT SEARCHING
    • 3.2.1 Full-Text Searching
    • 3.2.2 Wildcard Characters in Full-Text Searching
    • 3.2.3 Wildcards and Boolean Operators in Full-Text Searching
    • 3.2.4 Punctuation and Full-Text Searching
    • 3.2.5 Selecting a Search Option
  • 3.3 FIELD SEARCHING
    • 3.3.1 Searching in Specific Fields
    • 3.3.2 Advanced Field Searching with Regular Expression Operators
    • 3.3.3 Punctuation and Spacing in Fielded Searching
• 4. FIELDS AND THEIR DESCRIPTIONS
  • 4.1 LIST OF ALL FIELDS THAT CAN BE SEARCHED
  • 4.2 FIELD DESCRIPTIONS WITH SAMPLE SEARCHES
    • 4.2.1  Age When Writing
    • 4.2.2  All Subjects
    • 4.2.3  Author
    • 4.2.4  Author ID
    • 4.2.5  Awards
    • 4.2.6  Capacity (Seats)
    • 4.2.7  Character Code
    • 4.2.8  Character Name
    • 4.2.9  Choreographer
    • 4.2.10  Composer
    • 4.2.11  Costume
    • 4.2.12  Director
    • 4.2.13  Ethnicity
    • 4.2.14  First Production
    • 4.2.15  Gender
    • 4.2.16  Genre
    • 4.2.17  Level of Education
    • 4.2.18  Lighting
    • 4.2.19  Literary Period
    • 4.2.20  Location
    • 4.2.21  Lyricist
    • 4.2.22  Medium
    • 4.2.23  Music
    • 4.2.24  Nationality
    • 4.2.25  Number of Characters
    • 4.2.26  Occupation
    • 4.2.27  Organizations
    • 4.2.28  Performances
    • 4.2.29  Performers
    • 4.2.30  Person based on
    • 4.2.31  Personal Events
    • 4.2.32  Place of Birth
    • 4.2.33  Place of Death
    • 4.2.34  Play Title
    • 4.2.35  Previously Unpublished
    • 4.2.36  Producer
    • 4.2.37  Production Awards
    • 4.2.38  Production Code/Play Code/Scene Code
    • 4.2.39  Production Company
    • 4.2.40  Production Title
    • 4.2.41  Production Type
    • 4.2.42  Race
    • 4.2.43  Religion
    • 4.2.44  Resource Artist
    • 4.2.45  Resource Title
    • 4.2.46  Scene Title
    • 4.2.47  School Attended
    • 4.2.48  Set Designer
    • 4.2.49  Settings
    • 4.2.50  Sexual Orientation
    • 4.2.51  Sound
    • 4.2.52  Start Month/Year
    • 4.2.53  Subject Headings
    • 4.2.54  Theater District
    • 4.2.55  Theater Name
    • 4.2.56  Theater Style
    • 4.2.57  Type (of character)
    • 4.2.58  Type (of resource)
    • 4.2.59  Venue Code
    • 4.2.60  Written for
    • 4.2.61  Year Created
    • 4.2.62  Year First Produced
    • 4.2.63  Year of Birth
    • 4.2.64  Year of Death
    • 4.2.65  Year Published
    • 4.2.66  Year Written
• 5. RESULTS
  • 5.1 OCCURRENCES WITH CONTEXT/CONTEXT DISPLAY
  • 5.2 LINE-BY-LINE DISPLAY
  • 5.3 SORTING RESULTS BY AUTHOR
  • 5.4 SORTING RESULTS BY SOURCE
  • 5.5 SORTING RESULTS BY YEAR
  • 5.6 NAVIGATING DOCUMENTS FROM WORD SEARCHES

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 INTRODUCTION

North American Women's Drama provides sophisticated searching within the texts of more than 1,500 plays, as well as the ability to search author, play, production, theater, theatrical company and related materials.

For novices who wish to get quick access to key documents, we recommend using the Tables of Contents and the Simple Search tools.

For scholars who wish to conduct in-depth searches we recommend using the Multi-field Search, tool.  The search value of some of the fields in the database will not become apparent until more documents are added.
 

1.2 UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE OF THE DATABASE

There are three basic ways to use the database.

• Tables of Contents -- Use these to see what's contained in the database. This is the best way to check whether an author, a source, a play, a theater, a resource or a production company is included.  To use this tool, simply click on the appropriate table of contents button on the navigation bar.
• Find Tools -- The "FIND" tools let you search for specific authors, plays, characters, scenes, theaters, productions and resources that the database contains and combine criteria to narrow what you're looking for.  The difference between the "FIND" tools and the "SEARCH" tools (explained next) is in the results they give. The "FIND" tools do not return documents, but rather lists of authors, plays, scenes, characters, theaters, productions and resources in the database. Note the difference between plays (a collection of scenes) and the scenes themselves (which are within a play).
• Search Tools -- The "SEARCH" tools let you analyze words and documents that occur within the text of plays and that meet your search criteria. The "SEARCH" tools return plays or bibliographic citations or both.

• Simple Search - for novice users or those wishing to do a quick search. It provides basic searching of plays
• Multi-field Search - for users that wish not only to search the text of plays, but also to restrict the plays being searched by specific criteria.

The Tables of Contents Navigation Bar lets you move around the Tables of Contents tools. It works in the same way as the Search Tool bar. When using these tools, the Tables of Contents are expanded and the Full Text Searches are collapsed. You can toggle between the two by clicking Find or Search Texts.

The Tables of Contents are divided into nine separate categories, all of which provide quick access to specific materials within the database.

• Authors - a list of every major author in the database
• Years - a complete list of every play in the database, organized by the approximate year of writing.
• Plays - every play in the database is listed here, organized by author
• Characters - this is a complete list of all the characters in the plays that are in the database.
• Productions - this lists all the productions contained in the database.
• Theaters - a complete list of all theaters contained in the database.
• Related Media Resources - this lists related resources in the database such as playbills, posters, and other ephemera.
• Theatrical Companies - this lists all theatrical companies in the database
• Subjects - this is a selective listing of key subjects and the plays and scenes in which you'll find them.

1.5 NOTES ON MARK-UP CONVENTIONS

Materials in the database have been transcribed using original spellings and grammar. In some documents spelling is inconsistent, even within a sentence.

For more information on mark-up conventions, contact the Editor.

1.6 ABOUT THE SEARCH SOFTWARE

PhiloLogic, a suite of software developed by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago in collaboration with The University of Chicago Library's Electronic Text Services, provides sophisticated searching of a wide variety of large encoded databases on the World Wide Web. It is an easy to use, yet powerful, full-text search, retrieval, and reporting system for large multimedia databases (texts, images, sound) with the ability to handle complex text structures with extensive indexed metadata.

PhiloLogic in its simplest form serves as a document retrieval or look up mechanism whereby users can search a relational database to retrieve given documents and, in some implementations, portions of texts such as acts, scenes, articles, or head-words. This same document retrieval mechanism serves as the basis for defining a corpus in a full-text search. One can, for example, either retrieve all documents in a database written by women from 1935 through 1945 or one can search for words or phrases within database which fit those criteria. The typical PhiloLogic search is broken down into five distinct stages: 1) defining a corpus (i.e. limiting a search), 2) word expansion, 3) word index searching, 4) text extraction, and 5) link resolution and formatting (e.g., SGML to HTML conversion). In other words, after defining a corpus (or one may search an entire database), one can execute a single term, phrase or proximity search. By looking up indices of the word(s) in a relational database, PhiloLogic extracts blocks of text containing the search term(s) with links to larger blocks of text. These extracts are formatted to display on a Web browser and sometimes include links to images, sound recordings, other texts, or even other databases.

In addition to simple word and phrase searches, users can perform more sophisticated searches by using extended UNIX-style regular expressions for complex wildcard searching and, in some implementations, morphological and orthographic expansion. All of these mechanisms to expand words can be combined using Boolean operators such as OR (the vertical bar "|") and AND (a space) within a variety of searching contexts.

Its functions were originally designed for scholarly research in databases of literary, religious, philosophical, and historical collections of texts as well as important historical encyclopedias and dictionaries. PhiloLogic handles notes so as not to interfere with phrase searching. Users can easily search words with diacritics (either by specifying accents or ignoring them by typing in uppercase) and non-Romanized scripts. At present there are some fifty databases on the Web under PhiloLogic containing languages such as ancient Greek, Latin, Hindi, and Urdu as well as nearly all Western European languages. PhiloLogic can also be set up to recognize or ignore manuscript notations such as different brackets, which can indicate spurious text or editorial emendations. Because the software recognizes typical text structures as real data objects, it understands units, such as words, sentences, paragraphs, sections, and pages, permitting very flexible searching and retrieval of these textual objects. Other full-text engines on the market search for strings of characters. Rather than searching for two words within the same sentence or paragraph (intellectual units), other engines must search for two words within a certain number of characters regardless of sentence or paragraph. With PhiloLogic scholars always know where they are in a given text since pagination can be displayed along side other objects. Such a high degree of indexing can lead to decreases in speed, PhiloLogic indexing has been maximized such that it is still incredibly fast on the Web.

For more information on PhiloLogic, contact Catherine Mardikes, ETS Coordinator, The University of Chicago Library.

2.1 FIND AUTHORS

The Find Authors tool lets you find all the authors in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all Asian authors.

• Click on Find Authors on the navigation bar.
• Enter Asian into the Nationality field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all sources that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Authors see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.2 FIND PLAYS

The Find Plays tool lets you find all the plays in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all plays in the database written by Canadians between 1950 and 1990.

• Click on Find Plays on the navigation bar.
• Enter Canadian into the Nationality field.
• Enter 1950-1990 into the Year Written field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all plays that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Plays see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.3 FIND SCENES

The Find Scenes tool lets you find all scenes in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all interior scenes that contain musicians.

• Click on Find Scenes on the navigation bar.
• Enter musician into the Occupation field.
• Enter interior into the Settings field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all sources that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Scenes see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.4 FIND CHARACTERS

The Find Characters tool lets you find all the characters in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all characters who are businessmen in plays before 1930 in the database.

• Click on the navigation bar to get to Find Characters.
• Enter businessman in the Character field.
• Enter -1930 in the Year Written field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all sources that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Characters see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.5 FIND THEATERS

The Find Theaters tool lets you find all theaters that are included in the database.

Practical Example: Find all theaters in New York that are in the database.

• Click on Find Theaters on the navigation bar.
• Enter New York into the Location field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all theaters that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Theaters see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.6 FIND PRODUCTIONS

The Find Productions tool lets you find all the productions in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all productions of Megan Terry's plays.

• Click on Find Productions on the navigation bar.
• Enter Terry into the Author field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all sources that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Productions see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

2.7 FIND RESOURCES

The Find Resources tool lets you find resources in the database that match your specific criteria.

Practical Example: Find all resources with Henley as a subject in the database.

• Click on Find Resources on the navigation bar.
• Enter Henley into the Associated Authors field.
• Click on the SEARCH button.
• The system responds with a list of all authors that meet the criteria.

Note: For a detailed discussion of the fields in Find Resources see the section on Fields and their Descriptions below.

3.1 SEARCH OVERVIEW

There are two basic kinds of searching in the database.

• Full-Text Searching enables you to do keyword searching for occurrences of words or phrases in the database.
• Bibliographic Searching allows you to create a set of documents for subsequent full-text searching. When you conduct a Bibliographic search, you are using descriptive fields to execute the search.

3.2.1 Full-Text Searching

Full-Text Searching is when you search for specific words or phrases that occur in the texts themselves.

PhiloLogic supports wildcard characters and Boolean (logical) operators, which are modeled on UNIX regular expressions to perform "pattern matching" in full-text searching. Pattern matching allows identification of a large number of words corresponding to a defined pattern. Wildcard characters can be useful, for example, in identifying cognates made obscure by affixes and vowel weakening, inconsistencies due to irregular orthography, and variations on account of word inflection as well as for discovering potential emendations for uncertain readings. The most commonly used regular expression operators (wildcard and Boolean) are listed below.

3.2.2 Wildcard Characters in Full-Text Searching

. (period):

matches any single character (e.g., gentlem.n will retrieve gentleman and gentlemen).

* (asterisk):

matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the beginning of a word (e.g., cigar* will match cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.).

* (asterisk):

matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the end of a word (e.g., *habit will retrieve habit, cohabit, and inhabit), or in the middle (e.g., c.*eers matches compeers, cheers, and careers).

.? (period question mark):

matches the characters entered or the characters entered plus one more character in place of the question mark (e.g., hono.?r matches both honor and honour and cat.? matches cat and cats, but not cathedral, Catherine, etc.).

[a-z] (brackets):

matches a single character found in the specified range (e.g., [c-f]at will match cat, dat, eat, and fat) or any letters within the brackets (e.g., civili[zs]e will match both civilize and civilise).

# (hash mark):

matches capitalized words only (e.g., #bacon will retrieve Bacon, but not bacon). Otherwise word searches are case insensitive. Please note that this operator does not work properly in conjunction with the vertical bar (e.g., searching #hamlet|#bacon will not retrieve accurate results).

E (capital letter):

matches all accented and non-accented forms (e.g., to search naïveté regardless of accents type naIvetE).

3.2.3 Wildcards and Boolean Operators in Full-Text Searching

• The vertical line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., avarice|greed or holy ghost|spirit).

   

• Space: serves as the AND operator in sentence and paragraph Proximity Searching (e.g., church state retrieve all cases where church and state appear in the same specified context; this is not the case in phrase searching).

   

• These expressions can be combined for more sophisticated searches; for example, searching
  old|aged|ancient m.n|fellow*
  finds any of the three adjectives together with the nouns man or fellow in the singular or plural.

3.2.4 Punctuation and Full-Text Searching

• Hyphens: Hyphens act as word separators. Thus, one should treat hyphenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g., if searching for all-powerful, type in all powerful).

   

• 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 and realize that &c must be entered as simply c.

3.2.5 Selecting a Search Option

PhiloLogic at this time offers two kinds of searches: "Single Term and Phrase Search," which is set up as the default, and "Proximity Searching in the Same Sentence or Paragraph." One may select and deselect a search option by clicking on the "radio" buttons.

For a fuller discussion see the PhiloLogic User Manual

3.3.1 Searching in Specific Fields

When entering search terms in bibliographic fields, as opposed to the full text search box, use the following Boolean operators: uppercase AND, OR, and NOT. One can use a NOT operator by itself (e.g., in the Type field enter: NOT editorial). It must be the first term in the box with no spaces preceding and it cannot be used with other Boolean operators

3.3.2 Advanced Field Searching with Regular Expression Operators

As in full text searching, one can use regular expression operators for more specialized searching. The caret sign (^) at the beginning of a word anchors the match at the beginning of the entry (e.g., ^child will find the personal event "Childbirth," but not "Adoption of Child). One can also use the verticle line (|) as a Boolean operator OR. With this operator one can exclude two terms from one's search (e.g., NOT adams|burr).

3.3.3 Punctuation and Spacing in Fielded Searching

When entering terms, punctuation and spacing must match exactly that in the fields. The following marks of punctuation produce a "Nothing found" message: ampersand (&), parentheses, question mark, and double quotes (""). If necessary for searching, replace the mark of punctuation with a period, which stand for any single character.

4.1 LIST OF ALL FIELDS THAT CAN BE SEARCHED

Here is a summary table of all fields in the database, showing which tool they can be found on. Detailed descriptions can be found below.
 

	Author	Character	Play	Production	Resource	Scene	Theater	Simple	Multi-field
Age When Writing:			x						x
All Subjects:						x
Author ID:	x
Author:	x	x	x	x		x		x	x
Awards:	x
Capacity (Seats):							x
Character Code:		x
Character Name:		x				x
Choreographer:				x
Composer:			x	x					x
Costumes:				x
Director:				x
Ethnicity:	x
First Production:				x
Gender:		x				x		x	x
Genre:		x	x		x	x		x	x
Level of Education:	x