Tips of the Month

This page forms a repository for the Tips of the Month sent out as part of the Fweet monthly email newsletters. If you wish to subscribe to this mailing list, you can do so through the Comment on Me page.

June 2007

• If, every time you reach Fweet's search engine page, you find yourself changing some option from the website's default, such as turning on the "Show FW Text" or "Search in Finnegans Wake Text" options — or, even more frustratingly, you remember that you have forgotten to change it as soon as the results page loads on the screen — why not use the "Save Default" facility to customise the site to your own needs? Just select the combination of options you would like the default to be, click on the "Save Default" button, located under the "Search String" text box, and that configuration will be there waiting for you every time you return to the site, even weeks later. For more details, should you need any, see the appropriate entry in the user's manual, which describes the functionality of all the action buttons located below the "Search String" text box. Tip.

July 2007

• If you wish to browse the elucidations for a range of pages of Finnegans Wake (e.g. 109 to 113), it is probably simplest to type one page number (e.g. 111) into the "Page" text box (found near the middle of the search engine page) and then to use the "Previous Page" and "Next Page" facilities at the top of the results page to move to adjacent pages. If the range of pages you wish to browse is large enough, you may want to consider retrieving all the elucidations for an entire chapter at once by using one of the "Chapter" shorthands (e.g. I.5), located just below the "Page" text box. For more details, should you need any, see the entries for the Line, Page, and Chapter shorthands in the user's manual. Tip.

August 2007

• If you need to search for a word or a phrase from the text of Finnegans Wake itself (e.g. penisolate), rather than from the collection of elucidations, you should first turn on the "Search in Finnegans Wake Text" option (which is off by default). Note that this refers to the "Search in Finnegans Wake Text" option (one of the scope options), not to the slightly-similarly-named "Show FW Text" option (one of the display options). If you fail to do so (and there are no elucidations containing your search string), you will be reminded of it by a nice little message on the results page (fondly known as "Hint #091"). For more details, should you need any, see the entries for the Search in Finnegans Wake Text and Show FW Text options in the user's manual. Tip.

September 2007

• When you examine the elucidations for a given line of Finnegans Wake, you may also want to check the elucidations for the previous line, since a phrase containing words from the current line may have started on the previous line and is thus elucidated there. Fweet always attempts to associate an elucidation with the earliest possible word related to it, not necessarily the most conspicuous one. For example, if one currently examines 345.15 ("when you smugs to bagot"), one finds no elucidations about smoking tobacco, but were one to also look at those for 345.14 ("hate! Fairwail! Fearwealing of the groan! And think of that"), one would find a quote from Samuel Lover that reads "Think o' this when you're smoking tobacco", a quote that is accordingly associated with the word "think" on line .14. The simplest way to examine the elucidations for a preceding line is to use the "–" link located at the very beginning of any elucidation for the current line. Tip.

October 2007

• Unlike many other search engines, Fweet searches for the exact string you have typed in the "Search String" text box. For example, if you are interested in elucidations referring to Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, you cannot expect to find any by searching for "rape lock", "pope lock" or "pope rape", as these strings do not appear as such in the Fweet collection of elucidations. You can, however, find these elucidations by using search strings such as "rape of the lock", "of the lock", "rape THEN lock", "pope AND lock", or "lock AND rape AND pope", among many others. You can even just use "rape of", if you are willing to wade through some extra elucidations. Tip.

November 2007

• By default, Line and Page shorthands (like all other shorthands) are set to automatically submit their search. This means that you should not click on the "Submit Query" button when using Line or Page shorthands. If you do, a race occurs between your speedy click and the automatic submission mechanism of the browser, which may result, depending on your browser, in a search for an empty search string, a regular shorthand search, or, most commonly, two searches for the same shorthand being invoked in parallel, slowing each other (only one will appear in your browser). Again, you should not click on the "Submit Query" button when using Line or Page shorthands. I recommend either clicking on the search engine's auburn background or using the "Tab" key on your keyboard. Tip.

December 2007

• The "Whole Words" option significantly slows down searches. Running the same search, yielding the same elucidations, with and without this option, results in markedly different running times (e.g. two to three seconds (with the option) versus less than half a second (without)). Therefore, it is strongly recommended to use the "Whole Words" option only if necessary, namely only after a search for a short string (e.g. land) has resulted in too many irrelevant elucidations related to longer strings (e.g. Ireland, England, Icelandic, Wonderland, Holland, etc.). Please remember that running a search with the option will never return more elucidations than when run without (and will usually return less!), so there is no point in enabling it if no elucidations were found without it. Tip.

January 2008

• This tip is about a nifty trick of the web browser that is not well known, but may come in handy when using Fweet; sadly, it is currently supported only by Firefox and Netscape, to the best of my knowledge. If you place your cursor (i.e. click) within the "Search String" text-box, you can use the "Ctrl-Z" keyboard combination to move backwards to older (i.e. previously-typed) search strings (assuming there are any, of course), without having to retype them. You can use "Ctrl-Y" similarly to move forwards to newer ones (assuming you have already moved backwards using Ctrl-Z first, of course). Tip.

February 2008

• Fweet always searches for exactly what you have typed into the "Search String" box, so you need to know exactly what to type. Usually this is not a problem, but sometimes it may be. Should you type "thunderword" or "thunder-word" or "thunder word"? Is it "teastain" or "tea-stain" or "tea stain"? Is it "stop, thief" or "stop thief"? "Through the looking-glass" or "Through the looking glass"? And so forth. Rather than wrack your brains or try all options, why not use a special keyword intended just for this kind of case? Whenever you vacillate between spelling options that differ only in the presence or absence of spaces and/or punctuation marks, you should resort to the NEXT keyword. This keyword allows the word or words flanking it to be separated by any number (even zero) of spaces and/or punctuation marks and still qualify for inclusion by the search engine. Thus, for the examples above just use "thunder NEXT word", "tea NEXT stain", "stop NEXT thief" and "through the looking NEXT glass". If you feel particularly witty, you could even type "thun NEXT der NEXT word". For more details, should you need any, see the appropriate entry in the user's manual. Tip.

March 2008

• When you run a search using the "Search in Finnegans Wake Text" option, it is run on the Finnegans Wake electronic text as currently stored on Fweet's computer. Barring any unknown typos, this version is a compromise between the Faber-and-Faber and Viking editions (which are not identical). Where these two editions differ (see the "Variants, where Faber and Viking editions differ" shorthand under the "Editorials" brevity for a list of known differences), preference is for the one that better adheres to Joyce's corrections of misprints; if no such guidance is available, preference is for the one that agrees with the Penguin edition. The major implication of this is that if you search for a text as it appears in the Penguin edition (which is markedly different from the other two, since it does not incorporate any of Joyce's corrections of misprints; see the "Variants" shorthand under the "Editorials" brevity for a list of known differences), you run a small risk of not finding the text. For example, if you search for "hyelp hyelf nor" ([141.13] in Penguin and in old editions (pre-1957, I believe) that did not incorporate Joyce's corrections), you will return empty-handed. What you should be searching for is "hyelp hyelp nor" ([141.13] in every other major edition, including Fweet). Generally speaking, I would recommend avoiding the Penguin edition altogether, whether using Fweet or not, as it clearly does not reflect Joyce's intentions in about nine-hundred places (i.e. more than once a page). Tip.

April 2008

• It may be obvious to some, but not to others, that there are some lines of Finnegans Wake for which Fweet currently has no elucidations. Thus, if you search for such a line, you will obviously receive no results, through no fault of yours. However, in order to differentiate these lines from non-existent ones and to simplify the browsing between adjacent lines, their line number and associated links are still displayed. For example, if you search, using the "Line" shorthand, for line 029.36, for which there are currently no elucidations, the results page will show the number of "Elucidations found" to be '0', but the number of "Finnegans Wake lines" found will be '1' and a '–029.36+' set of links will be present, allowing you to browse to the previous or the next line. However, if you search, using the "Line" shorthand, for line 029.37, which does not exist, the results page will also show the number of "Elucidations found" to be '0', but the number of "Finnegans Wake lines" found will be '0' and no location links will be present at all. Tip.

May 2008

• Different operating system (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux) and different applications (e.g. web browsers, word processors) have different methods of internally coding the characters displayed on our computer screens. While most use the same conventions for displaying regular alphanumeric characters (i.e. a-z, A-Z, 0-9), variation is much greater when it comes to some punctuation marks (e.g. hyphens, apostrophes) and especially to accented letters (e.g. é, ü, å). What looks to our eyes as two identical characters, may be internally represented by two very different symbols, values or numbers. This short theoretical introduction explains why if you copy-and-paste any text other than regular alphanumeric characters from anywhere (including from some page of Fweet itself) into the "Search String" text box on the search engine page and then perform a search, that search may well fail (often resulting in a hint explaining the limits and perils of copy-and-pasting). Thus, the general recommendation is to avoid copy-and-pasting into the "Search String" box altogether and instead just type the text to be searched with one's ten (or two) fingers. Tip.

June 2008

• When you click on the the "Submit Query" button, try not to double-click. No big deal, but it does run two identical searches, instead of one. And while we're on the issue of the "Submit Query" button, you may also want to read (or reread) the tip for November 2007. Tip.

July 2008

• As is probably well-known by now, Fweet searches for exactly was has been typed (see the tip for October 2007 for more about this). There is however one exception and it involves spaces. Spaces are easily ignored by the human eye and the human mind, much more so than by computers; to avoid confusion, Fweet does the same. Any leading spaces (i.e. all spaces before the first character), trailing spaces (i.e. all spaces after the last character) and consecutive spaces (i.e. all spaces but one between words) are discarded from your search string by the search engine (with a short note to that effect). If you have added these spaces intentionally in order to search for whole words rather than parts of words, you should be looking at the "Whole Words" option in the user's manual. Tip.

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