Search the Typee manuscript

Notes on searching

The default search searches the full text of Melville's manuscript, including added and deleted text (along with insertion slip text). You may optionally restrict the search to added and/or deleted text only.

Searches are case-insensitive by default. You can make them case-sensitive by including one or more upper-case letters in the search term. For example, cook will match both “fire to cook us” and “Captain Cook”; Cook will match only the second example.

Searches use English-language stemming. That is, open will also match word forms like opens, opening, and opened; holy will also match holiest, etc.

Because Melville's spelling was erratic, you may want to use wildcard searches. In a search, an asterisk (*) matches zero or more non-space characters; a question mark (?) matches exactly one character. Examples:

• ch??f matches chief, cheif, Chief, Cheif, etc.
• island* matches island, islander, islanders, etc.
• *est matches honest, holiest, earnest, etc.
• op*eration matches both operation and Melville’s misspelling opperation
• *lit* matches little, fidelity, hostilities, etc.

Use a wildcard search to pick up matches that stemming will not catch. For example, wretch* will find wretched (but wretch alone will not); island* will find islanders (but island alone will not).

Limitation. Because of the way that uncertain text is handled in the underlying textual markup, a word search may not retrieve a word containing indecipherable characters. For example, li?eral will not match the unclear word denoted in the transcription as “li{?}eral”. In this particular case a phrase search on li eral will match, however. (This is because the underlying XML representation of the MS word is li<unclear/>eral; the intervening tag breaks this into two word tokens.)