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Islendinga Sogur (Icelandic Sagas) with lemmatized concordance: A Basic Helpsheet

There is an instruction booklet (in Icelandic) that accompanies this CD-ROM; if you need further assistance after reviewing this helpsheet, please ask an Etext staffer for the booklet.

I. BRIEF OVERVIEW OF STRUCTURE AND CONTENT:

The following information comes from the publisher, Mál og menning; click here to visit their website.

The Íslendinga Sögur CD contains 40 medieval narratives, accompanied by powerful search programs and a lemmatized concordance (which brings together all the different forms of the same word). The text of the sagas is drawn from a popular complete edition of the Sagas of Icelanders, in which the sagas were printed with modern spelling, while taking into account the most reliable previous editions, and in one case a scholar's unpublished manuscript. Some of the sagas were published in two versions. The text published on CD-ROM is thus not comparable with any other complete edition, and the concordance refers only to this edition.

The concordance covers all the sagas included in the above mentioned complete edition (with the exception of proper names and the vocabulary of poems). Words have been categorised by part of speech, nouns have been classified by gender, and all the forms of a single word have been brought together in a single screen display.

Both the text of the sagas and the concordance are accessible via the Microsoft Multimedia Viewer 2.0 hypertext search and view program, which enables the user to find words, word forms and phrases rapidly, whether in the concordance or in the saga text. Text and concordance are also linked. The user can choose to search in the sagas or in the concordance. If searching in the sagas, the text (one page) appears on the screen. A word can then be selected, and the concordance entry for the word appears in another window, with all the examples of the word selected (i.e. in all its grammatical forms) in the order in which they appear (page order). Entering the concordance, it is possible to search for any word. The different forms of the word are arranged in alphabetical order by context, i.e. alphabetical order of the following word. Thus it is possible to gain an overview of fixed phrases, formulas, etc.

Two separate indexes are also included on the disk. One is a thesaurus of all nouns in the concordance of the sagas. Words are classified into 54 themes, of which 21 are main themes (e.g. nature, conflict, working life, religion, women, dreams). The other is an index of hapax legomena (words that occur only in one saga) and word pairs (that occur only in two sagas). Both these lists can be printed out in their entirety.

II. STARTING UP ÍSLENDINGA SÖGUR:

Place the CD in the CD drive of the PC. Click on the "Start" button, select "Programs", then select "Sögur" from the list of applications. Select the "Íslendinga Sögur" icon from the submenu. If you cannot find this icon, please ask a staff member for assistance.

The program will boot up and bring you to a title screen. Click on this title page to get to the main index page.

III. USING ÍSLENDINGA SÖGUR:

This program is entirely menu-driven and should be easy to navigate for anyone with a working knowledge of Icelandic. Here are few of the most common commands:

  • To print, press "Alt-k" and then "p".
  • To get to the index, press "T". To browse through one of the indexed sagas, click on the title, and then use the arrow buttons at the top of the window to scroll forward and backward through the text.
  • To get to the search menu, press "L". Type in the word you want to search for, and use the checkboxes to specify which sagas you want to search. Pressing "Enter" will generate a list of hits; clicking on a hit will take you to the place where it appears in the text.
  • To use the concordance, press "O". Pressing "A" will take you to an index; you can type in a word or select one from the list. Press "Enter" to generate a list of hits. You can use the green links to jump back to the full text of the sagas. To exit the concordance and return to the sagas, press "s".
  • To return to the previous screen, press "T".
  • To set a bookmark, press "Alt-b" and then "s"; to go to a bookmark, press "Alt-b" and then "f".
  • To get to the help menu, press "Alt-h".

IV. EXITING ÍSLENDINGA SÖGUR AND REMOVING THE CD-ROM:

When you are finished using the CD-ROM, press "Alt-k" and then "h" to exit the program. 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.