Thomæ Aquinatis Opera Omnia
Editoria Elettronica Editel
This copy is made available to UVa users only.
Thomæ Aquinatis Opera Omnia is a commercial product held by us under a licensing agreement with Editoria Elettronica Editel. Access to the CD is restricted to on-site use by students faculty and staff at the University of Virginia. The Electronic Text Center does not have the rights to give or sell general access to this material.
This program runs in DOS mode. To ensure that the program will work properly, be sure to exit out of any open Windows applications before running it.
Scope and Contents
This CD-ROM contains hypertext versions of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas in Latin, along with 61 other medieval Latin writings associated in some way with the works of Aquinas. The menus and on-line help are in English.
The search-and-display capabilities of this program are somewhat limited -- you can search for no more than two words in proximity to one another, and you can only search for complete words -- no truncated words allowed. In addition, the software's print feature seems to be disabled, which means you must transcribe any results you wish to retain.
Starting up Thomæ Aquinatis opera omnia:
Place the CD-ROM in the computer's CD carrier (press the button outside of the CD-ROM drive to open and close it). Click on the Start button, select Programs, then click on the MS-DOS icon labelled Thomas Aquinas (near the end of the list). If you cannot find this icon, please ask a staff member for assistance.
The program will load and you will arrive at a welcome screen. Click OK to continue.
Using Thomæ aquinatis opera omnia:
The program's main screen is a grey blank with a menu bar at the top. Clicking on one of the six terms in the menu bar will reveal the pull-down menu for that term.
Here are some of the basic functions of the Thomæ Aquinatis Omnia Opera:
- To perform a search, select Search word(s) from the
Query menu, or press F4. You should see a dialogue box
with several input fields.
- To search for a single term, type the word into the field labelled FORM 1 and click OK.
- To search for two terms at once, type the first word into the FORM 1 field and type the second word into the FORM2 field. Click on the Or button to generate hits that contain either search term. Click on the And button to generate hits that contain both search terms. If you choose this option, you can specify the maximum distance (in words) between your search terms by typing a number from 1 to 99 in the DISTANCE field.
To limit your search within one particular work, select Where to search from the Query menu or press F5. The program will display a list of all of the texts included in the database. Use the up and down arrow keys or the scroll bar to the right to navigate through the list. Click on any text to select it, then click OK to constrain your next search to that one text. By default, the program will search all texts.
Once you've made all of your selections in the search dialogue box, click OK to enter them. You will return to the blank gray screen, but you should see a new menu bar along the bottom of the window. (Note that only this bottom menu bar is now functional during a search; to access the commands from top menu bar, you would need to close out your search by clicking Exit at the far right of the bottom menu bar.) Click Start on this menu bar to perform your search. If you arrive at a strange-looking list of terms and alphanumeric codes, you're doing just fine. - To view your search results in a more intelligible format,
click cg View on the bottom menu bar. This will bring you to a
display screen showing the first hit of your search. For example, a
sample search for "GENTILES" produced the the following display
screen:
The title of the work in which the word was found ("IN I SENTENTIARUM") appears near the top of the screen. Just below the title, the program displays the number of the current hit in relation to the total number of hits ("1 of 1062"). Below that, the word searched for ("GENTILES") appears highlighted within a few lines of surrounding text. Click on Next and Previous on the bottom button bar to scroll through your hits and display them one by one. - To browse through a particular text, select Text from
the Reading menu or press F2. You will see a list of all
texts included in the database. Use the arrow keys or the scroll bar to
the right to navigate through the list. Click on a text to select it,
and then hit OK.
As with the search function, the browse function will produce a second menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Click cg View to display the text along with the corresponding line numbers. Click Continue to scroll through the text. - To export your results to an ASCII file, you must first select file name from the Options menu. The program will prompt you to name the export file; type in the name and click OK. You can then save the results of a search to this file by selecting Print Search from the Query menu.
- To access the on-line help system, click on the Help menu or press F1. You can navigate the help system by single-clicking on the green buttons to the right of the screen, or by double-clicking on the blue hypertext links within the main frame. Scroll through the help screens using the scroll bar at the far right.
Exiting Thomæ aquinatis opera omnia
Exit the program by selecting Exit from the System menu (or by pressing Alt-X). Close the DOS window by clicking on the close button (the "X" at the top right of the window). You should find yourself back at the Windows desktop. You can then eject the CD-ROM by pressing the button below and to the right of the CD carrier. Please place the CD-ROM back in its case and return it to an Etext Center assistant.