PN Search Updates

Digital Papyrology 

 Dear Colleagues: We write with recent updates to the PN.

 (1) Search facets now feature auto-complete combo-boxes instead of simple drop-down menus. So, let’s say you search for #οικονομ (strings that start with οικονομ); 913 hits. You are really just interested in the Hermopolite and so you click into the ‘Nome’ facet. As you start to type ‘he’ you see your options shrinking...1 Heliopolite, 1 Heptakomias, 80 Herakleopolite, and 24 Hermopolite. Select Hermopolite and see your 24 hits. The same sort of thing should work with the other facets as well.

 (2) APIS Collection and Publication Series facets now play nicely together. Let’s say you remember that a Berkeley papyrus was published in P.Coll.Youtie, but you cannot remember which and you do not have the book to hand. Select Berkeley from the ‘Collection’ facet; 4316 hits. Select ‘DDBDP: p.coll.youtie (2)’ from the facet box, or else start to type, p.coll; 2 hits. Find P.Coll.Youtie 12.

 (3) Improved indexing of regularizations. Let’s say you are interested in documents whose first word after the greeting χαίρειν is βούλομαι vel sim. You search for "χαιρειν# #βουλ" (with the quotes; a string equal to or ending in χαιρειν followed immediately by a new-word string starting βουλ); 11 hits. But you will miss Chrest.Wilck. 323, since lin.7-8 read χέρειν(*). βουλό|μεθα. Why? Because χαίρειν is in this case not, strictly speaking, adjacent to βουλ; χερειν is. This is an important fact to master. In this particular case, it means that, knowing that χαίρειν is often rendered as χέρειν, you must search carefully. You can either (a) enter search query "χαιρειν# #βουλ", then click OR and in the new search box enter "χερειν# #βουλ"; 12 hits or (b) search for REGEX χ(αι|ε)ρειν\sβουλ; 12 hits. The regular expression for ‘αι or ε’ is (αι|ε) and the regular expression for space is \s. Note that under both of these searches PN *finds* Chrest.Wilck. 323 but does not properly *highlight* the query for that text. This is a known bug; we are working on it.

 (4) We now support abbreviation-aware searching. Say you are looking for abbreviations beginning πρ. Search for #πρ° (enter πρ and then click the abbr button; ° indicates opening parenthesis); 862 hits. NOTE: this new feature has some known bugs: (a) highlighting: if you search for #πρ° in your first hit you will see highlighting on both Πρ(ώτων), which you expect, and on Πρώτων, which you do not. We are working on it. (b) highlighting: if you search for τιθ° you will see that in your 6th hit (BGU 9.1891) none of the highlighted hits is τιθ( , which is what you expect to see. But if you click to view the text, you will see (lin.169, 194, 220 etc.) Τιθ(οείους), which is what you expect to see. This isn’t very helpful; you want the right hit on the search results page. We are working on it. (c) false positives: if you search for αρ° you will find in your second hit (BGU 1.4) that none of the highlighted hits includes αρ( , which is what you expect to find. And (ἑκατοντάρ)χ(ῃ) and χ(ιλιά)ρ(χῃ) (both in lin.1) even seem misleading: in neither case is αρ on the papyrus at all. We are working on it; this particular fix may even be live by Monday, and in any case quite soon. (d) XML error bug: if you search for °ετους, expecting many many many hits, you find only ten! There is a bug in the search, whose fix will be in soon (along with (c) above); but there are also odd bugs in the XML, which we’ll fix.

 As always, if you have questions, please feel free to contact us. Generally best to write to ast@uni-heidelberg.de, hugh.cayless@nyu.edu, james.cowey@urz.uni-heidelberg.de, and joshua.sosin@duke.edu. Or just write the papy-list. All best, josh sosin