WordCruncher – a Latter-day Saint study resource

[champatsch]

Probably not enough members know about the resources for study, talks, lessons freely available in WordCruncher.

First, there's a lot of Church material free to the public: precisely searchable electronic versions of Latter-day Saint scriptures, General Conference addresses, some Church manuals, and many other Church-related publications. One I was just looking at today was The Allegory of the Olive Tree (1994). To get this and others, just go into the WordCruncher bookstore, found under the File menu of the installed program. Also, a very small corpus of Joseph Smith's early writings (letters and his 1832 history, edited) will be there soon, with links to the JSP website.

Second, there are non-Church ebooks available as well. As one example, the Riverside Shakespeare has been freely available in WordCruncher for many years. In addition, a year ago I had four pseudo-biblical texts put on there. Eventually, 24 pseudo-biblical texts will be there, at varying levels of quality, constituting almost half a million words.

Third, there are a few items that can be bought, but each one is available as a free trial.  These include Dead Sea Scrolls study material, a high-quality 1830 Book of Mormon facsimile, and a 700-million-word EEBO corpus made up of more than 25,000 early modern texts (1473–1700). The distinct advantages of these searchable ebooks, over what is available elsewhere, are explained in the material downloaded as part of the trials.

Fourth, the critical text of the Book of Mormon will eventually be there as well as ATV, but these last two may be a few years off — perhaps around the time the 22-text collation (01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST) is released through WordCruncher, signaling the end of the Book of Mormon critical text project.

[Stargazer]

17 hours ago, champatsch said:

Probably not enough members know about the resources for study, talks, lessons freely available in WordCruncher.

First, there's a lot of Church material free to the public: precisely searchable electronic versions of Latter-day Saint scriptures, General Conference addresses, some Church manuals, and many other Church-related publications. One I was just looking at today was The Allegory of the Olive Tree (1994). To get this and others, just go into the WordCruncher bookstore, found under the File menu of the installed program. Also, a very small corpus of Joseph Smith's early writings (letters and his 1832 history, edited) will be there soon, with links to the JSP website.

Second, there are non-Church ebooks available as well. As one example, the Riverside Shakespeare has been freely available in WordCruncher for many years. In addition, a year ago I had four pseudo-biblical texts put on there. Eventually, 24 pseudo-biblical texts will be there, at varying levels of quality, constituting almost half a million words.

Third, there are a few items that can be bought, but each one is available as a free trial.  These include Dead Sea Scrolls study material, a high-quality 1830 Book of Mormon facsimile, and a 700-million-word EEBO corpus made up of more than 25,000 early modern texts (1473–1700). The distinct advantages of these searchable ebooks, over what is available elsewhere, are explained in the material downloaded as part of the trials.

Fourth, the critical text of the Book of Mormon will eventually be there as well as ATV, but these last two may be a few years off — perhaps around the time the 22-text collation (01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST) is released through WordCruncher, signaling the end of the Book of Mormon critical text project.

I downloaded it and installed it on my laptop.  Now if I can find the time to figure out how to use it!

[Bernard Gui]

 

23 hours ago, champatsch said:

Probably not enough members know about the resources for study, talks, lessons freely available in WordCruncher.

First, there's a lot of Church material free to the public: precisely searchable electronic versions of Latter-day Saint scriptures, General Conference addresses, some Church manuals, and many other Church-related publications. One I was just looking at today was The Allegory of the Olive Tree (1994). To get this and others, just go into the WordCruncher bookstore, found under the File menu of the installed program. Also, a very small corpus of Joseph Smith's early writings (letters and his 1832 history, edited) will be there soon, with links to the JSP website.

Second, there are non-Church ebooks available as well. As one example, the Riverside Shakespeare has been freely available in WordCruncher for many years. In addition, a year ago I had four pseudo-biblical texts put on there. Eventually, 24 pseudo-biblical texts will be there, at varying levels of quality, constituting almost half a million words.

Third, there are a few items that can be bought, but each one is available as a free trial.  These include Dead Sea Scrolls study material, a high-quality 1830 Book of Mormon facsimile, and a 700-million-word EEBO corpus made up of more than 25,000 early modern texts (1473–1700). The distinct advantages of these searchable ebooks, over what is available elsewhere, are explained in the material downloaded as part of the trials.

Fourth, the critical text of the Book of Mormon will eventually be there as well as ATV, but these last two may be a few years off — perhaps around the time the 22-text collation (01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST) is released through WordCruncher, signaling the end of the Book of Mormon critical text project.

Thanks. Looks great!

Do you know of any free searchable libraries of 18th and 19th century American literature? UVirginia used to have one.

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by Bernard Gui

[champatsch]

Take a look at all of Mark Davies' corpora, perhaps the world's leading online corpus website, which includes an EEBO corpus and a 19c American corpus. I made an Evans corpus that I'll probably put on WordCruncher in the near future, with books published in America from 1640 to 1800.

[InCognitus]

Thank you for bringing this tool to our attention!

I miss the search and statistic capabilities of the old 1990 DOS version of "LDS View" (which I think used some of the Infobase search concepts - I still fire up this application once in a while).  And for years I have tried to find a decent replacement for my favorite Bible search software, the old 1992-1997 16-bit version of "QuickVerse for Windows", using Craig Rairdin's search engine.   QuickVerse has a side-by-side view that I use with the Strongs Concordance on one side of the screen, and it so fast and easy to use that I still use this nearly every day.  But since it is a 16 bit program, I have to run it in a virtual machine (or the old XP, Mode of Windows 7), since it won't run in a 64 bit OS.  It appears that WordCruncher may provide some similar features, so I am hopeful that this may satisfy my needs!

Thanks again.

 

[Jesse Vincent]

On 9/21/2019 at 12:56 PM, InCognitus said:

Thank you for bringing this tool to our attention!

I miss the search and statistic capabilities of the old 1990 DOS version of "LDS View" (which I think used some of the Infobase search concepts - I still fire up this application once in a while).  And for years I have tried to find a decent replacement for my favorite Bible search software, the old 1992-1997 16-bit version of "QuickVerse for Windows", using Craig Rairdin's search engine.   QuickVerse has a side-by-side view that I use with the Strongs Concordance on one side of the screen, and it so fast and easy to use that I still use this nearly every day.  But since it is a 16 bit program, I have to run it in a virtual machine (or the old XP, Mode of Windows 7), since it won't run in a 64 bit OS.  It appears that WordCruncher may provide some similar features, so I am hopeful that this may satisfy my needs!

Thanks again.

 

Hello! Jesse from WordCruncher here. What kinds of search and statistic capabilities are you looking for from the DOS version? WordCruncher has an array of different tools for searching and analyzing texts, but we've changed and improved them over the years.

 

[InCognitus]

11 hours ago, Jesse Vincent said:

Hello! Jesse from WordCruncher here. What kinds of search and statistic capabilities are you looking for from the DOS version? WordCruncher has an array of different tools for searching and analyzing texts, but we've changed and improved them over the years.

The statistics capabilities is part of what drew my attention to WordCruncher after reading this thread and checking it out.  I downloaded and installed WordCruncher since writing the post I made earlier in the week, and it looks exactly like what I've been looking for and more.

In WordCruncher, I like the clean cut-and-paste of scripture verses from WordCruncher to other applications.  I like the parallel and synchronized windows of the English Parallel Bibles (QuickVerse does that too).  I like the search capabilities too.  It's great!   The only thing I'm still getting used to is the fast verse lookup capability.  That's one thing I really liked about QuickVerse is that I could just type CTRL-S, and then 1 Cor 2:10, and it would take me straight to the verse instantly.  I found that I could do something similar in WordCruncher, by typing tab, then the first letter of the volume of scripture (i.e. o, n, b, d - for OT, NT, BoM, D&C) and then a space, and then the book name and hit space, and then the verse and hit space (etc.), and doing that gets me to a reference pretty fast.  It's not quite as fast and easy as QuickVerse, but it takes practice to make it muscle memory. This way of searching is a lot more spacey (pun intended).   But I like that I can do that at least.

 

[Jesse Vincent]

10 hours ago, InCognitus said:

I found that I could do something similar in WordCruncher, by typing tab, then the first letter of the volume of scripture (i.e. o, n, b, d - for OT, NT, BoM, D&C) and then a space, and then the book name and hit space, and then the verse and hit space (etc.), and doing that gets me to a reference pretty fast.  It's not quite as fast and easy as QuickVerse, but it takes practice to make it muscle memory. This way of searching is a lot more spacey (pun intended).   But I like that I can do that at least.

 

I'm glad that it is mostly the same and what you're looking for! I like the CTRL + S idea for scriptures, but the tab setup allows it to be applied to any book, so that books that we don't know by heart are still easily navigable. (Imagine knowing every genre, act, scene of Shakespeare by heart like we do the scriptures.)

[InCognitus]

16 minutes ago, Jesse Vincent said:

I'm glad that it is mostly the same and what you're looking for! I like the CTRL + S idea for scriptures, but the tab setup allows it to be applied to any book, so that books that we don't know by heart are still easily navigable. (Imagine knowing every genre, act, scene of Shakespeare by heart like we do the scriptures.)

Yeah, I was thinking about the possibility of multiple books and I understand why you had to do it that way.  I'm a software consultant for a mid-sized to large company accounting software package.  Sometimes my clients complain about why something has to be done one way or another, and they don't understand the scope of what the software can do and the reasons behind why some choices were made in the way the software functions.  So I get it 

I dislike the point and click method of navigation to find a reference while using a computer (on a phone or touch screen device it's different of course).   It's slow and awkward to me, so I appreciate the keyboard shortcuts.   Looking up a scripture reference on the Church website drives me nuts because of that point-and-click methodology.  Of course the Church website has some of the same considerations (of multiple content sources), but they should just have a scripture lookup box somewhere!

There are a lot of things I like about WordCruncher.  I like that it saves my layout (scriptures on the left, English Parallel in the middle, and English Parallel - Advanced on the right).  I like that I can double click on a Hebrew, Greek, or English word and see how often its used and how it is translated (for non-English words) and scroll easily through the list.  I like that I can right-click a word and look it up in the dictionary (Strongs) and all the other options available with right-click.  It's awesome!   I'm still getting used to it, but it's definitely what I've been looking for.

 

[Jesse Vincent]

22 hours ago, InCognitus said:

 

I dislike the point and click method of navigation to find a reference while using a computer (on a phone or touch screen device it's different of course).   It's slow and awkward to me, so I appreciate the keyboard shortcuts.   Looking up a scripture reference on the Church website drives me nuts because of that point-and-click methodology.  Of course the Church website has some of the same considerations (of multiple content sources), but they should just have a scripture lookup box somewhere!

 

 

Glad that you found WordCruncher! I informally call it the "Adobe" of text analysis programs. There is a lot involved. The plethora of tools allow for some interesting research projects, but the bare majority of research can be done with 6-10 tools. It just takes a little bit of getting used to.

I personally dislike the point-and-click navigation, too. If I am navigating with it, I typically use the arrows on the keyboard to navigate through it rather than clicking.