Getting started¶

It is assumed that you have read start and followed the installation instructions there.

Corpus¶

This is

• oldbabylonian Old Babylonian Letters

First acquaintance¶

We just want to grasp what the corpus is about and how we can find our way in the data.

Open a terminal or command prompt and say one of the following

text-fabric oldbabylonian

Wait and see a lot happening before your browser starts up and shows you an interface on the corpus:

Text-Fabric needs an app to deal with the corpus-specific things. It downloads/finds/caches the latest version of the app:

Using TF-app in /Users/dirk/text-fabric-data/annotation/app-oldbabylonian/code:
    rv0.2=#4bb2530bfb94dc93601f8b3df7722cb0e5df7a43 (latest release)

It downloads/finds/caches the latest version of the data:

Using data in /Users/dirk/text-fabric-data/Nino-cunei/oldbabylonian/tf/1.0.4:
    rv1.4=#43c36d148794e3feeb3dd39e105ce6a4df79c467 (latest release)

The data is preprocessed in order to speed up typical Text-Fabric operations. The result is cached on your computer. Preprocessing costs time. Next time you use this corpus on this machine, the startup time is much quicker.

TF setup done.

Then the app goes on to act as a local webserver serving the corpus that has just been downloaded and it will open your browser for you and load the corpus page

 * Running on http://localhost:8106/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
Opening oldbabylonian in browser
Listening at port 18986

Help!¶

Indeed, that is what you need. Click the vertical Help tab.

From there, click around a little bit. Don't read closely, just note the kinds of information that is presented to you.

Later on, it will make more sense!

Browsing¶

First we browse our data. Click the browse button.

and then, in the table of documents (tablets), click on obverse

Now you're looking at one side of tablet: the marks in an ASCII transcription.

Now click the Options tab and select the layout-orig-unicode format to see the same tablet in cuneiform signs.

You can click a triangle to see how a line is broken down:

Searching¶

See that line, starting with the word um-ma, and whose last word ends in the sign ma?

That is a pattern. Let's search for it.

Enter this query in the search pad and press the search icon above it.

line
  =: word
    =: sign reading=um
    <: sign reading=ma
    :=
  < sign reading=ma
  :=

In English:

search all lines that contain a word and a sign where:

• =: the word starts where the line starts
• the word contains a sign and a sign where:
  • =: the first sign starts where the word starts
  • <: the second sign follows the first sign immediately
  • := the second sign ends where the word ends
• < the sign comes after the word
• := the sign ends where the line ends

You can expand results by clicking the triangle.

You can see the result in context by clicking the browse icon.

You can go back to the result list by clicking the results icon.

Computing¶

We see that this line comes at the start of a tablet.

In fact, this pattern corresponds to a heading of a letter.

Question: of all 1274 results, how many are the first line, the second line, the third line, etc?

This is a typical question where you want to leave the search mode and enter computing mode.

Let's do that!

If you have followed the installation instructions, you are nearly set.

Open your terminal and say

jupyter notebook

Your browser starts up and presents you a local computing environment where you can run Python programs.

You see cells like the one below, where you can type programming statements and execute them by pressing Shift Enter.

First we load the Text-Fabric module, as follows:

Now we load the TF-app for the corpus oldbabylonian and that app loads the corpus data.

We give a name to the result of all that loading: A.

Some bits are familiar from above, when you ran the text-fabric command in the terminal.

Other bits are links to the documentation, they point to the same places as the links on the Text-Fabric browser.

You see a list of all the data features that have been loaded.

And a list of references to the API documentation, which tells you how you can use this data in your program statements.

Searching (revisited)¶

We do the same search again, but now inside our program.

That means that we can capture the results in a list for further processing.

In less than a second, we have all the results!

Let's look at the first one:

Each result is a list of numbers: for a

1. line
2. word
3. sign
4. sign
5. sign

Here is the second one:

And here the last one:

Now we want to find out something for each result line: which line number does it have among the lines on the same tablet face?

Click the link Feature docs above, and read a bit under Node type line.

There you see that the feature ln is of particular interest to us.

First we get the line number of result 1000:

Now we collect the set of all line numbers that our result lines have:

What we really want to know is how the result lines are distributed over the line numbers.

An overwhelming majority has it on line 3

Let's make the output a bit more friendly:

We can now inspect more closely what is going on, for example where results appear late in the tablet, after line 16:

And we can show them here too:

But at this point it might be easier to take the new query back to the Text-Fabric browser and query it there: