More on Comparing Questions

[Michael T]

I read David Lang's blog post on March 28th 2011 'Any Questions,' with great interest. I am impressed that Accordance has the capacity to return such results with a search string as short as '.?' I tried searching for questions in the NRSV and I got 3509 hits, then I tried searching the NASB and I got 3131 hits. 378 question marks are a significant discrepancy.

 

My question is as follows: What is the easiest way to compare the number of punctuation marks (question marks, for example) in two texts? I would have assumed that I could simply use the [HITS] command. But when I, 1) search for '.?' in the NRSV, 2) open another tab and search for '.?' in the NASB, 3) enter the search string '.?@- [HITS NASB]' into the NRSV window, I get the following error message "The HITS word list cannot include any character expression (a character immediately following".")." I assume the problem is that [HITS] is set to compare words rather than punctuation.

 

Any ideas?

[Helen Brown]

HITS compares the word list from the source window. In this case you would use the CONTENTS command to compare the two verse lists. For example, searching the NRSV for:

.? [CONTENTS NASB]

should give you all the verses in NRSV with a question mark, except for the verses in your NASB window.

[Michael T]

Thanks Helen,

This worked perfectly! It also highlighted that the initial discrepancy was, in part, due to the fact that NRSV was also returning hits from the Apocrypha whereas the NASB was not. It did however highlight those instances where the NRSV had a question and the NASB did not. If one was inclined, I suppose a Range could be set up in the NRSV to provide a direct comparison.

 

Thanks