Write.Teach.Tech

TextPad and Open Source eTexts: Recognizing Patterns in Literature
by Tonya Howe

It can be very difficult to keep accurate track of interesting words or images in a text you're reading, so why not use technology to help you? While you should always keep good notes of your own ideas and interests as you read, using technology in a creative way can help you quickly and easily find relevant passages for further examination. Your university library may have digital access to a full-text, searchable database of primary resources (like EEBO or ECCO or the Brown Women Writers project), but then again, it may not--or,  you may have only facsimile access to the EEBO collection, without the ability to search it for individual strings.

But we can get around all that, in most cases!

What you need: a good, multi-functional text editor like TextPad and a piece of literature in plaintext format, available from any number of public domain, open source repositories--like Project Gutenberg.

The goal: Generate a .txt copy of the text you want to search, and open it in TextPad. Then, use the "find in file" feature to spit out a list of every instance of your search term, as it exists in the line of text. You can navigate back and forth between the search results and their location in the .txt file; you can also print and save a file of those search results for future reference.

The limitations: This process won't do all the work for you. You have to be creative in your searches, aware that there may be other terms equally helpful for you to search for, and familiar with the text you're searching, as your plain text file will not be paginated.

Here's what you do:

1. Download and install TextPad.
2. Find an online copy of the text you're interested in investigating. I'll use as my example Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, found online at Project Gutenberg. If you're using a PC, right-click on the uncompressed, plain text link, and "Save Link As."
3. Open the document in TextPad. Note: Make sure that the lines of text don't continue horizontally ad infinitum, becuase the "find in file" feature returns the line in which the search term is found. If each paragraph is one long line, this won't work. Usually, if you save the file in its non-compressed, plain text format from Gutenberg, the file will be workable as is.
4. At this point, you might want to remove the header and footer information, though this is not necessary. If you do make any alterations to the .txt file, be sure to save it first--the "find in file" tool will find in the saved version, not the temporary version. Turn on the line numbers (VIEW > LINE NUMBERS).
5. In the main menu, select SEARCH > FIND IN FILES. A dialogue will appear, where you browse for the location of your saved plain text version of Jane Eyre and enter the search terms.
6. After you've browsed for the folder where you've saved jane.eyre.txt, enter the filename in the appropriate field. Select the following conditions: "text" and "match whole words." If you wanted to find all variations of a word, you would not select this condition. Select "all matching lines" from the report detail options. This option will create a separate file with all the lines of jane.eyre.txt that include your search term.
7. Now, enter your search term. I want to search for the whole word, "reader"--more specifically, I'm looking for all those instances in the novel when the narrator addresses her reader directly; I know that the narrator almost always uses this form of the word to do so, so I don't have to worry about "readers" or "reading" or any case variation.
8. Click "find." TextPad will create a new file with every line including the word "reader," as well as a tally of all instances. In my example, the word "reader" appears 39 times in Jane Eyre (+1 instance in the footer information). At this point, you can do more searches--they will be appended to the working document, which you may save at any time.
9. But what's really great about this feature is that the results list is linked to the file jane.eyre.txt. You can therefore move from the results list to the exact place in jane.eyre.txt where that instance occurs. Now, you can read more context and find the place in your actual copy for any citations. Note: the linking feature is only active while both files are initially open. If you save, close, and open both again, the linking feature will no longer work. But, the line numbers will still be there.

You can often find an online version of a text simply by googling for "etext" and "the title you're looking for." With some creativity, you can use this technology to read in different ways. Enjoy!