Text Search

Exact Word or Phrase Search Overview

Figure 11: Poor Word Search - Click to see image

Many people, when performing a word search, type in as much information as possible.  The result is a search that might look something like the one in figure 11.  Unfortunately, this search will yield zero results (and others like it will yield very few).  Often, this causes people to think that eHRAF does not have the information they want, when this is far from true.  By following a few rules, your searches will be much more fruitful.

1)     Truncate!

eHRAF searches for the exact word or phrase you type in.  Thus, if you search for the word “mythology” you will miss instances of “myth,” “myths,” and “mythologies” as well as synonyms like “legend” or “folklore.”  One way to help the situation is to shorten the word and add and asterisk.  Thus, searching for “myth*” will find all the variations on that word.  As for the synonyms:

2)     Use different boxes for each synonym.

Since searching with “myth*” will not find “legend” or “folklore,” these are good words to put in the other text boxes.  However, be sure to set the Boolean operators to “or” so you aren’t searching for a paragraph/title that contains all three words.  Again, be sure to truncate all of your words.

3)     Search titles for broad topics, paragraphs for narrow ones

In this section of the search, there is a drop-down box that lets you choose between “titles” and “paragraphs.”  Generally, when you are searching for a broad topic like “myths,” it is best to start with a title search.  This searches all of the chapter and sub-chapter titles in every document.  Paragraph searches are better for narrower searches, as they will list every paragraph that contains the word separately, rather than the entire chapter or section.

4)     Don’t use the word search for culture groups or regions.

As mentioned earlier, most of the documents in eHRAF are ethnographies, and thus cover only one culture, so searching for “Native Americans” will be ineffective.  It is better to search for a specific culture using the Culture/OWC search section.  Further, it is also not effective to search for a geographical region like “northwestern plains.”  In an ethnography on the Blackfoot, it is not likely that the exact phrase “northwestern plains” will be mentioned once or twice in the whole book, if at all.  This means you are not likely to get any results where both “myth” and “northwestern plains” are mentioned in the same paragraph.  Again, it is more effective to search for a specific culture rather than for the area where it can be found.  

5) Avoid jargon.

Some of the documents in eHRAF date to the 1920s and earlier, meaning they predate many words or phrases common in today's language.  For example, the term "domestic violence" and the word "revitalization" are both relatively recent additions to our lexicon and therefore fail to have many matches in the eHRAF database.

Figure 12: Better Word Search - Click to see image

By following these rules, you end up with a search like that in figure 12, that gives you 27 matches in 10 documents on the Blackfoot.  By clicking on the culture name, you see a list of the matching chapter titles (fig 13).  From there, you can select a chapter to read its full text.  However, though word searches are convenient, there is a way to get many more high-quality results: using OCM Subject Codes.

Figure 13: Chapter Title Matches - Click to see image

Instructions

1.    Click on "Search, then in “Exact word or phrase” type in “myth*”, “legend*”, and “folk*” in the three text boxes.  Set all of the Boolean operators to “or” and search in “Titles.”  Click the search button.

2.   Select Blackfoot under North America, noticing that there are 27 matches in 10 documents with this search.  Select a chapter to view its contents.

Additional Information:

Terms: Ethnography, OCM Subject Codes