Searching

Searches in PGWDE can be constructed using any combination of full-text query, author and recipient selectors, and date ranges. Results are returned, by default, in order of relevancy score. (A document containing many occurrences of your search terms, or one in which your search terms cluster together, will rank higher than a document containing fewer terms or ones farther apart.) A successful search produces a set of results, each consisting of a clickable pointer to the matching document.

The maximum number of results returned by a search is currently limited in order to improve performance. The maximum number is set via the preferences page, and ranges from 100 to 20,000. For fast searching, it is best to set the maximum to a conveniently low number. If you are interested in seeing more of the results for a particular search, set the maximum to a larger number and run the search again.

Full-Text Search

Capitalization

Searches are case-insensitive when you use lowercase letters. For example, if you search on chambers you will retrieve letters with rooms and chambers and David Chambers. Searches containing capital letters are case-sensitive: searching on Chambers will retrieve David Chambers but not rooms and chambers.

Automatic “and” queries

It isn’t necessary to specify and between terms, as the search returns a result only if it contains all of your terms. You can refine your results further by supplying more terms. For example, to research the punishment of deserters, try searching for guilty desertion to return documents containing both those words.

Phrase searches

To restrict a search to an exact phrase, enclose the search term in quotation marks. For instance, "guilty of desertion" would retrieve only documents with that precise formula.

Thesaurus matching

Our search engine software enables creation of a thesaurus to define matches between a given term and any number of synonyms or alternate spellings. In PGWDE ’s search this function is used to include common abbreviations and alternate spellings of key terms. For example, choose will find choose and chuse, and honor will expand to honor and honour. A search on Philadelphia will also retrieve letters containing Philada, Phila, or Philad.

List of thesaurus terms.

Stemming

The search engine automatically expands nouns and verbs to match any form that derives from the word stem by a change in number, tense, or conjugation. For instance, goose will also match geese; fight will also match fights, fought, and fighting. Stemming is also supported for French-language documents: a search on permettre will find permet, permettez, etc.; a search on œil or oeil will match yeux.

Wildcards

Search terms may incorporate wildcards: an asterisk (*) matches zero or more non-space characters. A question mark (?) matches exactly one non-space character. For example, battle* matches battlefield. A wildcard search can be used to find matches that stemming will miss. For example, rebel* matches rebellion and rebellious but rebel does not.

Field operators

Currently, one advanced operator is available to restrict a search: prefixing note: to a term or phrase will limit matches to editorial notes only. For example, note:smallpox will find documents with smallpox in the notes; note:"Benjamin Franklin" will look for references to Ben Franklin there. A note operator can be combined with other terms; for example, the query horses note:"Boston Harbor" will match documents containing horses anywhere and Boston Harbor in the notes.

Additional Search Paths

Automatic Completion of Author and Recipient Names

Searches can be narrowed to documents authored or received by a particular person. When you begin typing in the Author or Recipients field and then pause, a drop-down box will appear beneath it with a regularized list of all names that start with the letters you have typed. For instance, typing “T” will display a list of all authors whose family name begins with “T”, and typing “Taylor” will populate the list with authors whose last name is Taylor. Use GW in both author and recipient searches for George Washington. To browse a complete list of authors or recipients, type “*” in the entry field. Names in the drop-down list can be selected using either the mouse or keyboard. Author/recipient searches can be combined with full-text queries or used independently of the full-text search.

Date Range

The search form includes date range controls to allow a search for documents written on a particular date or within a range of dates. Dates can be entered manually (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) or selected using the calendar control that appears when you click on the input field or the button next to it. To specify a single day, enter its date in both the start and end date fields (the calendar controls are coordinated to make this more convenient). The date range fields can be used by themselves or combined with a query to refine a full-text search.

If the start or end fields are left blank, they default to the dates of the earliest and latest documents in the collection, respectively. To find references to Charlottesville before 1760, for example, you could enter the search

Find:
Charlottesville
1741-01-01 start...     1759-12-31 end...

In general, the narrower the date range of a search, the lesser the number of results returned. There are years for which there are few or no documents in the PGWDE; a search that is restricted to these years will return a correspondingly low number of results.