Corpus Search is powered by BlackLab, a tool for finding words or sequences of words in EEBO-TCP texts. In BlackLab, a “word” is more than just the letters from which it was formed: associated with a “word” are a number of properties (its regularized spelling, the lemmatized form of the word, its part of speech) which can be used in addition to or instead of the original spelling.

For example, suppose we’re interested in the word which was originally spelled “louing.” We could search for “louing,” of course. We could also search for “loving” (its regularized spelling), “love” (its lemmatized, or dictionary headword, form). We could even search for the regularized form “loving” where its part of speech is “vvg” (the code for “verb, present participle”): in this case, we’d be searching for “loving” no matter how it was originally spelled, but only when it was used as a verb.

Corpus Search also makes it possible to search for sequences of words. For example, it’s quite easy to search for sequences of words like “most loving”. Corpus Search also allows the user to group the results various ways, to filter results by author, title and/or year of publication, and to export/download search results.

BlackLab is a product of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. We use two Blacklab software packages: the core BlackLab server, and the related front-end, the latter slightly modified for our purposes. Our Phase I data comes from our project’s BitBucket repo. Our complete Phase I and II data comes from our copy of the TCP data, which we’ve annotated with the last public release of MorphAdorner.

Corpus Search offers three ways to search: by Word or phrase, by using a Query Builder, or by writing CQL queries directly. These options are available through tabs at the top of all three search pages (A):

Word or Phrase Search is the simplest of the three, and is a good place to start. To search for a word, enter its regularized spelling, original spelling, or lemma in the appropriate text box (B), and click the blue Search button (C). It’s possible to limit (“filter”) results by author, title or year (D) before clicking Search. To filter by a range of years, enter values like 1600 TO 1640.

Note the help links arranged across the page. These links offer information which is also useful when using the Query Builder and writing CQL queries. Note also the faint gray prompts (“reg,” “word,” “lemma,” etc.) inside the input boxes. (“Word” roughly denotes the original spelling, although we slightly normalize the original typography, modernizing long-s, dropping superscripted letters, and expanding certain typographic abbreviations like vowels with superscript macron or tilde.) These gray prompts are useful in learning BlackLab’s CQL names for the properties of words; knowing these names will prove useful when using the Query Builder and writing CQL queries.

Results appear below the Search button

and are presented in two ways via the Per Hit and Per Document tabs (E). Per Document simply lists the titles of the documents which contain matches, and reports the number of matches in each document; pop-ups offer a bit more metadata. The report on the Per Hit tab is richer, listing every match; it is essentially a Key Word in Context display, in which the corresponding document titles are shown (the default) or hidden (see the red button the right of F). The pageable results are organized by source document (F), and offer several different ways of ordering the results. It is also possible to export the results.

The Group hits function (G) can be very useful. If one goes into the Group hits by dropdown widget, checks Group by reg (for regularized spelling) in the Before hit section of the widget, and then clicks the Update button, one gets results like these:

The words which occur immediately before “loving” are grouped and counted; the green horizontal bars (H) represent relatively how many times each of the pairing words occur: “and loving,” “a loving,” and “most loving” being the three most frequent pairings of [word] + “loving” discoverable in the corpus.

Searching for two or more words in sequence, like “most loving,” constitutes a phrase search that returns results just as a single word search does. To search for a phrase, simply type it into the Regularized spelling(s), Original spelling(s), or Lemma(s) fields.

Query Builder

Blacklab’s second way to search is its Query Builder, available via the tab near the top of the page (I):

Query Builder makes it possible to write complex, multi-word queries. For example, in Query Builder, we can search for all combinations of “most” followed by a present participle (i.e., all phrases like “most knowing” and “most pleasing”)

Query Builder is organized around one or more term-related boxes. A “term-related box” is an interface widget used to specify one word in complex, multi-word queries. For example, if we’d like to find all combinations of “most” followed by a present participle, we’d have a term-related box specifying that we want to find “most” (J) followed by a box which says we want to find all present participles (K).

The red box with a plus inside (L) can be used to add more term-related boxes. Inside term-related boxes are more plus widgets (M), which are useful for further complicating queries.

For example, suppose I wanted to find every instance of “most” or “all” followed by a present participle. I would use the plus widget (M) to create:

Just as with Word or Phrase Search, the Query Builder allows one to “Filter” a search and variously “Group” the results.

CQL

Whether you run Query Builder or Word or Phrase Search, the display of results is always preceded by a line like

Results for: “[ reg = “most” | reg = “all” ] [ pos = “vvg” ]” within all documents

This exposes the syntax of the query that is passed to the underlying search engine:

[ reg = “most” | reg = “all” ] [ pos = “vvg” ]

which is a CQL (Corpus Query Language) query. Corpus Query Language is a standard used by linguists to search digital corpora. It’s implemented on several other platforms besides BlackLab.

The results section shows the query to make it easier for curious researchers to learn CQL. The documentation for Blacklab offers a fuller introduction to CQL.

Those familiar with CQL can compose their queries directly via the CQL tab near the top of the page (N):

CQL queries may be entered as plain text strings inside the large Corpus Query Language text box (O). CQL queries can be Filtered and their results Grouped as with searches instigated on the other tabs.