Combining Searches

[Mike Kiser]

Trying to figure out how to combine searches, such as the following:

 

1) all greek words used n times or more

 

2) all greek words used in John

 

Combining those two would be helpful; anybody know how to do that (seems difficult given the diff search ranges)

 

Thanks!

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

In what way do you want to combine them? In other words, what kind of results do you want?

 

Do you want a list of all the words appearing at least n times in the Greek New Testament AND all the words in John (whether or not the word in John appears at least n times in the Greek New Testament)?

 

Do you want a list of all the words in John that also appear at least n times in the Greek New Testament?

 

Or something else?

 

Both of the above can be done, I think, but how you get there is different.

 

Lorinda

[Mike Kiser]

 

Do you want a list of all the words in John that also appear at least n times in the Greek New Testament?

 

 

 

The above is what I'm looking for.

 

Thanks for the rapid reply, Lorinda.

 

I want to find all words that occur in John AND that occur in the NT N or more times. So, I want all words in John that occur at least N times in the entire NT, to put it in a different way.

 

=Mike

[David Lang]

Mike, to do what you're asking, set the Range in the range pop-up menu to All Text, then use the COUNT command and the RANGE command, like this:

 

[COUNT 1] <AND> [RANGE John]

 

By setting the Range pop-up to All Text, you ensure that the COUNT command will look for words which appear a given number of times within the GNT. The RANGE command then filters the results so that it only shows the hits for the book of John. I actually blogged about the differences between the two ways to define a range recently.

[Joel Brown]

[COUNT N] [RANGE John]

 

Edit: oops, David was too fast!

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Here's how I did it, for all words occuring at least 30 times (in the entire New Testament):

 

In one tab (named GNT-T), with the Search Range drop-down set to "All Text", enter the following search criteria:

 

*<NOT> [COUNT 1-29]

 

In a second tab, set the Search Range drop-down to John, then enter the following search criteria:

[HITS GNT-T]

 

Then, in this tab, click on the Details button (the one that looks like a bar chart) and choose (or open) an Analysis tab.

 

Note that I chose to exclude all hits <n-1 rather than include all hits for n or greater, because I was having trouble figuring out how high the second number in the range would have to go to catch everything greater than n.

 

The search could probably be refined to remove articles, etc. if you wanted.

 

Lorinda

[Mike Kiser]

Aha! The part that I was missing : the fact that COUNT can take a range.

 

Many thanks to all.

[David Lang]

You can tell Lorinda is a power user, because only power users even think to use the HITS command. And she's right. If the range pop-up and RANGE command didn't work a little differently from each other, you would have to use the HITS command.

 

I'll give you a little Accordance development history here. When we added the RANGE command as a quick way to add temporary ranges, we saw how the differences between the two ways of defining a range affected the Graphs you would get and the results you would get with the COUNT command. Since the difference between the two ways to define a range actually made it easy to do this kind of COUNT search, we decided to leave things as is rather than trying to enforce a stricter consistency that would have been more limiting.

 

That said, Lorinda's method also works, though it needs to be tweaked a little. Here are some pointers:

 

1. Remember the difference between connecting commands like AND and NOT and the at (@) symbol.

 

The search * <NOT> [COUNT 1-29] will look for any words which do not appear in the same verse as any word which appears less than 30 times. In other words, this search requires that every word in the verse be one which appears 30 or more times. That's why the results only return an average of one or two verses per chapter.

 

What you really want is * @-[COUNT 1-29]. That will find every word which appears 30 or more times, even if it appears in the same verse as a less common word.

 

2. To define that count positively, you would need to do [COUNT 30-20000], since the Greek definite article is used just under 20000 times in the GNT. If you used a top count of 10000, articles would be excluded.

 

By the way, I figured out the top number I would need by first doing a search for an asterisk to find all words, opening the Analysis window, and then choosing to sort by Counting Down.

 

3. While a little more complex, Lorinda's method of using the HITS command in a window with the Range pop-up set to John does have one big advantage over my method: it renders a much better Hits Graph and Analysis Graph.

 

Hope this helps.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

I don't know if it's so much being a power user so much as not remembering that COUNT could be used that way. I tend to default to only using the Range pop-up for COUNT, as that provides the results I usually want. I know the other method (in the search criteria) doesn't get me what I want, but I don't always remember what it does. Which means I tend to forget it's even an option.

 

Thanks, too, for the reminder about the difference between AND and @. If I sit down and think about it, I remember the difference, but if I'm working quickly it escapes me easily.

 

Lorinda.