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The search engine can look through dozens of texts,
including all five full-length MT texts featured in this
site, and report results in an incredibly short period of
time. I've found a lot of ways to use this capability in
teaching these texts, and students have found textual
searches a good early step in the development of an idea
into an essay. But when doing a search it's important to
remember how literally a computer follows orders. If you
ask it to look for the word "innocence" in Innocents
Abroad it will report that the word appears one time
(and take you to the line in which it appears). It won't,
however, look for any other forms of the word, so that if
you want to know about "innocent" and "innocents" as well,
you should search for "innocen" -- which will capture all
three words.
The reviews can be searched in the same fashion. It's revealing to compare the number of times the word "slavery" appears in the reviews of Huck Finn, for example, with the number of appearances made by the word "humor." In addition the reviews of MT's books can be organized and/or searched by various descriptive categories -- Favorable or Unfavorable, for example, or the date or place they appeared -- and the reviews of his live performances can be sorted and searched according to similar kinds of categories. The full range of these options can be seen from the "Search the Reviews" page. |