The semantic tags that organize and contextualize the content are at the heart of Orlando. All Orlando documents are richly encoded with XML tags (many with attributes and attribute values) that represent key issues in feminist literary history. They capture prose that can be extracted from its original contexts (such as an author profile or an event entry) and included in results lists or collections that still enable you to return to those contexts. For inspiration and guidance, explore the Tag Diagrams and Glossary, or this essay about our markup.
To begin, enter a search term (or leave that box empty), then select a tag from the Search within tags drop-down menu. Some tags have attributes (narrower properties) on which you can search, and sometimes those attributes have specific values from which to choose. These will be loaded by the system.
You can begin a tag search by searching on a tag without specifying a term, and then specify a term in the Refine panel, after looking at the initial results.
If you have chosen a term on which to search, you can modify that term within the results screen, without having to restart your Tag Search.
Facet tag searches using the Refine panel.
Note that Tag Facets work differently with Tag Search than with regular Search.
Tag facets allow you to filter Search results by including or excluding one or more tag contexts. Tag Search results look instead for combinations of the tags your search specified with the faceted Tag, and result in a greater narrowing of results.
A regular search starts broad, looking for a match or close match to the word or words entered into the search box. Faceting then narrows down the results by looking for instances of those words within the parameters of the facet, if that facet draws on a tag (e.g. Genre, Nationality). For instance, a search for ‘smallpox’ will yield more than 200 results of smallpox captured in different tags across the textbase, which can then be narrowed by Result types, Author characteristics, Tag contexts in which the result is found, and specific Locations associated with authors.
A Tag Search targets a specific tag from the outset, with or without a search term, and provides results from across the textbase that match the specific criteria (the tag alone, or the tag + search term). Faceting then looks for a co-occurence of the search criteria with the Tag selected in the facet. That is, the term and/or tag specified in the Tag facet needs to be inside the Tag specified in the initial search.
A tag search on ‘smallpox’ within the tag Health will provide you with more than 30 results that can be narrowed, as with the regular search, by Result types, Author characteristics, and specific Locations associated with authors. Using the Refine panel to facet on the Cause of death Tag will reveal the handful of writers who died of the disease. Faceting on tags in which the word “smallpox” does not occur will yield no results.
To modify Tag Search criteria, you can clear all filters or return to Tag Search.
Occasionally, glitches in how content interacts with search produce too few results or too many results. Such errors when we become aware of them are corrected in our regular content updates.
