About this app

PhiloReader is a text search and retrieval interface that interacts with digitized text collections running on the ARTFL Project's servers at the University of Chicago. This app allows users to query and read texts from a wide range of collections that contain a variety of documents (dictionaries, newspapers, literary works, historical texts, etc) from a variety of languages, including Japanese, German, French, English, Sanskrit and other Indic languages. Users can conduct basic text and metadata searches and return search results in concordance reports, as well as word frequency reports by basic metadata fields. Or users can simply locate and read texts and bookmark them for future reading.

For a full list of text collections and dictionaries available for search, see the menu on the home page.

*Search, retrieval, and reading*

Selecting a text collection:

The home page of the app contains a dropdown menu of all available text collections. Upon selecting a text collection, touch the three-line navigation icon on the left side of the Action Bar to open a mini search form that contains search parameters for the collection. To see all texts contained in the collection, simply touch "submit" with no search parameters. To search a new collection, return to the home page by touching the information icon on the upper right portion of the screen and by selecting "Home Page." Use the dropdown menu to select a new collection.

Word search:

To search or retrieve texts, touch the three-line navigation icon on the left side of the Action Bar. A search form drawer will toggle on the left side of the screen. The name of the selected text collection will appear at the top of the search drawer. To search for occurrences of a word in the database, fill in the "Search terms" field. Search terms are not accent sensitive: for example, entering "eclat" will return all instances of "éclat". Note also that wildcard characters will expand search terms. For example, "amour.*" will retrieve instances of "amour," "amoureux," "amoureusement," etc.

Condordance report:

The default report for word searching is a concordance report. Search results are displayed 25 at a time. Use the arrow buttons at the top of the screen to click through results. Touching a list item will retrieve a larger chunk of text for reading.

Frequency report:

To generate a word frequency report by various bibliographic parameters, touch under "Choose a search report" and available options will appear in a spinner (dropdown) menu. Results will display in a complete list. Touch links to retrieve a concordance report for the individual frequency results.

Bibliographic searching:

To delimit word searches by author, title, or other bibliographic parameter, fill in the specific field and hit submit. To do a basic bibliographic search, enter terms only in the author and/or title fields and hit submit. Touching a list item in a bibliographic search result will return a Table of Contents for the document.

Reading:

When reading a text section, click the arrow buttons at the top left portion of the screen to retrieve previous or next text sections, if available. Touch the title at the top of the screen to retrieve a Table of Contents.

Bookmarking:

To bookmark a chunk of text, touch the bookmark icon in the upper right part of the Action Bar. A menu with any existing bookmarks will pop up, as will an option to bookmark the current page. To retrieve or delete a bookmark, touch the item in the list. From the dialog, select either "View text" or "Delete bookmark."

New features

Required update to target Android 10.

App Permissions

Allows applications to open network sockets.
Allows applications to access information about networks.
Allows an application to write to external storage.
Allows an application to read from external storage.