Help: Searching, Filtering, and Viewing Transcriptions

The (beta) Transcriptions Viewer allows you to search by keyword using simple and complex queries, to filter your search results, and view the scans and transcriptions of individual pages.

The search engine searches through the entire text corpus for the exact term you entered. For example: schip will show you all pages which include this exact search term only.

Note that keyword searches are not case sensitive. For example admiraal and Admiraal will produce the same results.

Multiple Keywords

If you enter two or more search terms next to each other, the search engine finds the occurrence of either one or both terms. For example swarte peper will show you all pages with swarte and peper as well as pages with swarte or peper.

Combining and Excluding Keywords

If you add (in uppercase letters) the operators AND or OR between your keywords, the search engine will find all occurrences in the text corpus that contain all the keywords (AND) or else, any one of the keywords (OR).

For example: swarte AND peper will only show pages that include both swarte and peper. Similarly, swarte OR peper will show all pages that include one or the other. Note that this is different from just entering swarte peper as we saw above, this will also list pages that included both search terms.

If you wish to search for a keyword but exclude another one, you can do this using NOT. For example, engelse NOT oorlog will find all pages that include engelse but only if these do not also include oorlog.

Expanding your Keywords

With the use of special wildcard characters (* and ?) you can expand your keyword search to include variants of your search term. This can be applied to single words or phrases.

For example, schip* will not just find pages with the word schip but also pages with the words schipper and schippers. More precisely, it will find any word that begins with the letters schip.

You can also use this wildcard to search for a specific word preceded or followed by any other word. For example, * schip would find pages with the words afgevaren schip, geen schip and oorlog schip.

If you wish to expand your keyword by just a single character, you can use the ? wildcard. For example: cop?e will show pages with copie, but also with copye. It will not, however, show results with coppere since this requires more than one character to substitute for the ? wildcard.

You can also combine several wildcards, for example noodsa??kel??kheyt to find noodsaackelyckheyt and noodsaeckelyckheyt and noodsaackelijkheyt and noodsaeckelijkheyt. These four words can also be found more simply with noodsa* or, if the number of search results is too large, with noodsa*kel*.

Exact Phrases

Placing several search terms, such as a phrase, in double quotes will find the places in the text corpus where that exact phrase occurs. For example: "copije met de bijlage geteekend" will find the phrase copije met de bijlage geteekend in the text corpus, but not pages with copije geteekend.

Keyword variants

If you want to look for multiple variants of a keyword (for example, different spellings) but do not know where exactly these changes occur, you can use a wildcard (~) that determines how many changes (additions, deletions, or substitutions) can occur in the keyword. This wildcard, followed by a number, allows you to search for keywords that contain a certain number of character changes ('edit distance').

For example: voorschreven~1 will find voorschreven, voorschreve, voorschteven, veorschreven but not veorschreve because this differs from voorschreven by two characters (the e and the missing ending -n).

Note that the changed characters can occur anywhere in the keyword. For example, suiker~1 will find sucker, suider and zuiker.

It is possible to combine several search queries with any combination of AND, OR and NOT operators. When doing so, you can use round brackets to separate search queries.

For example: trader OR merchant OR koopluyden OR schipper will find results in which any one of these words occur at least once.

For example: (gecommitteerd OR gecommitteerdens) NOT gecommitteer will find results which include the word gecommitteerd or the word gecommitteerdens at least once, but not gecommitteer.

For example: commissie NOT "seeckere commissie" will show results in which the word commissie appears, but not if it is part of the phrase "seeckere commissie".

For example: (commis* OR gecommit*) NOT gecommitteerden will find results containing words starting with commis or gecommit, but not containing the word gecommitteerden. Note: this search can also be simplified to *commi* NOT gecommitteerden.

Punctuation

Note that when you expand a keyword search with a wildcard the search engine will treat all matching characters the same, including punctuation. For example, slaafbaarheijd? will include pages with slaafbaarheijd, since the comma at the end is being treated as part of the word. Without adding the ? or * wildcard at the end of the keyword, slaafbaarheijd will not find instances of slaafbaarheijd, with a comma at the end.

Since * and ? are normally used as wildcards, you need to take special measures to include these in your search term as regular characters. This is done by placing the character after a backslash (\). To search for all words ending in question marks, use, for example, ??\\? this will find all two letter words ending in a question mark, such as is?.

Filter

At present, you can only filter your search results by the VOC archive's inventory number. First carry out a normal keyword based full-text search. Then enter an inventory number (e.g. 1053) in the filter field to limit the list of results to pages from that inventory. You can also filter on multiple inventory numbers by listing them separated by commas (e.g. 1053,1604A).

Viewing Page Images and Transcriptions

The keyword(s) matching your query in the search view will appear highlighted in the transcription next to the corresponding image of the original document. To move to the previous or next page, click on the navigation links beneath the transcription.

You can zoom in and out of the page image by using the + and - buttons. Reset the zoom view with the adjacent reset button. Please note that the previous and next buttons to the right of the zoom controls are not linked to the transcript. These only allow you to move between individual images. To view both the previous or next image and transcription simultaneously please use the navigation buttons underneath the transcription.

Toggling the sidebar to the top left of the page image reveals additional information (metadata) as well as further means to navigate between individual page images.