I've decided to list all of the New Church/Swedenborg related search engines I'm aware of and give my opinion of their pros and cons. Let me know if I've missed any or if you have a different point of view.
NewSearch/HeavenlyDoctrines.org (
http://heavenlydoctrines.org/dtSearch.html)
Description:I'm pretty sure that this is the oldest and most popular search engine for Swedenborg's theological works. It is currently in version 4.0 which includes an entirely new layout and more documents in its database. It is part of the STAIRS project, funded by the
Academy of the New Church Theological School. It is powered by
dtSearch.
Pros:- This engine has by far the most translations available to read and search (including the
New Century Edition).
- It allows you to search
New Church Life and other New Church collateral literature.
- It allows you to search the Latin.
- It gives you a lot of control over your search argument and a pretty good explanation of how to use the different features.
Cons:- It's controls are not easy to use.
- You can't read sequentially. You have to individually search for each passage you want to read.
- You can't toggle between different translations of a passage.
- You can't choose to search only in certain books.
- You can't see a list of the books that you can search.
- The search results are ordered by relevance (
i.e. how many times the words you searched for appear in a given passage) rather than by book (
i.e. all the results from
Arcana Coelestia first, then all the results from
Heaven and Hell etc.). Some people probably prefer this.
BaltimoreNewChurch.org (
http://www.baltimorenewchurch.org/search/index.cfm?action=search.searchwritings)
Description:This search engine was originally developed as part of the now defunct ourvirtualchurch.org project (part of which became
SwedenborgDigitalLibrary.org). It has since been revamped and simplified with the intent of being a newcomer-friendly search engine. (To this end BaltimoreNewChurch.org also includes summaries of New Church teachings on
God, the
life of religion and other topics, consisting of just passages from Swedenborg's works. These summaries also include some suggested reading and suggested searches.) It has a
Search Doctrines tool and a
Read Doctrines tool. The search engine is powered by
ColdFusion.
Pros:- It's the nicest looking site in my opinion. (There's not much competition in this department and I'm probably biased because I worked on this site.)
- It allows you to search only the books you select.
- It provides short descriptions of the books.
- It provides an easy interface for jumping to a specific passage and reading sequentially.
Cons:- If you want to read a different translation of a passage than the default you have to look up the passage and then select the translation you want.
- It doesn't allow as much control over your searches as some others.
- When you view a search result the words you searched for are not marked in any way.
- The search results are ordered by relevance.
Small Canon Search (
http://smallcanonsearch.org/)
Description:This search engine was developed by Steve Simons in connection with
Second Advent Christianity. The tagline of the site is "The Complete Word of God for All People" and it allows you to search the
Second Advent Christian canon which includes the books of the Bible said to have an internal sense (
Arcana Coelestia 10325) and Swedenborg's published theological works. (Here's
Kurt Simons' argument for considering only Swedenborg's published works to be Divine revelation.)
Pros:- It has a clean, easy-to-use interface.
- It has some great advanced searching tools, including the ability to indicate words that are more or less important in the search results.
- It has
Google Translate built in so that you get a rough translation of a given passage in a bunch of different languages.
- It allows you to cross check your search results using Google, Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask. I'm not sure if I would ever use this tool but it's kind of cool.
- You can
add a SmallCanonSearch box to your web site, Google homepage, Google toolbar, or Firefox search bar.
Cons:- It doesn't allow you to just search Swedenborg's works. Obviously it was designed this way on purpose but if I want to search the Bible I'll search that separately and if I want to search Swedenborg's works I just want to search them.
- You can't search Swedenborg's unpublished works. Again, obviously it was designed this way but, personally, when I'm researching something in Swedenborg's works I want to see results from his unpublished works as well.
- It only has one English translation of each book.
- It doesn't allow you to look at the Latin.
- This is a minor point but instead of giving the short name of a book it gives the full title of the work (
e.g. The Book of the Apocalypse Revealed, Uncovering the Secrets That Were Foretold There and Have Lain Hidden until Now 885 instead of
Apocalypse Revealed 885). Kind of cool at first but it slows you down and so becomes frustrating, in my experience.
e-Swedenborg.com (
http://www.e-swedenborg.com/)
Description:All I know about this site is what I can learn from clicking around in it. It
links to some material from the old version of HeavenlyDoctrines.org and its
book descriptions seem to have been copied from BaltimoreNewChurch.org. I'm guessing that it was built by Ian J. Thompson who built
SwedenborgStudy.com (see my
post about that site) because it has a search box for searching another of his web sites,
TheisticScience.org.
Pros:- Because all of the information on it has been lifted from elsewhere I don't see anything in particular to recommend it over those other sites except that it has the
Directory of Teachings in the Heavenly Doctrines that used to be on HeavenlyDoctrines.org.
- It does have a relatively simple (though plain) interface with the search and read tools all on the same page.
Cons:- It seems to use
Google Custom Search but it must have some bugs because it only returns
3 results if I search for fish (which, for some reason, is what I chose to search for).
KemptonProject.org (
http://www.kemptonproject.org/)
Description:This isn't a search engine for Swedenborg's works but it is an extremely useful tool for studying them. It was developed primarily as a tool for people to collaborate on the Kempton Revision translation of the Word (read more about the translation philosophy
here). The main thing it provides is an online tool (based on
Searle's Index) that allows you to see all the places in Swedenborg's works that reference a particular passage in the Word. Select a book and a chapter and click "Study."
Things I'd Love to See in a Search Engine:What's missing from the Swedenborg search engines that are currently available? Well, obviously I'd like a site that had all of the pros that I listed and none of the cons, but beyond that there are a couple of features that I'd like to see.
Side-by-Side Translation Comparison: The software version of Kempton Project allows you to view multiple translations and the Latin, all at once, instead of having to toggle between them. I haven't yet seen this online.
Hyperlinked Tables of Contents and Indices:For some reason, the texts available in all of the search engines don't include the tables of contents. Sometimes when I'm looking for a certain passage I'd be able to find it much more quickly if I could glance through the table of contents instead of having to try to remember a specific phrase from the passage. As I
reported recently, you can find a
hyperlinked version of the table of contents of New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine on
BibleMeanings.info. And I just discovered that you can find the
tables of contents for one translation of each of the Swedenborg's published theological works at
SwedenborgDigitalLibrary.org (some books with more links than others). The links take you to
SmallCanonSearch.org. All we need now is to have this for all the translations of all the books and for all their indices.
Collaborative Search and Research Community: A couple of years ago Steve Simons made a Swedenborg related
swicki at
EmanuelSwedenborg.info. It currently seems a little broken and neglected but the concept is pretty cool. The idea is that people who are interested in Swedenborg would use it to research Swedenborg and would rate the results as good or bad and provide comments on them so that people who search for the same thing would find what they're looking for sooner. (Here's a
swicki for free online games.) The swicki that Steve set up searches the whole internet. I don't know if you could make one that would just search Swedenborg's works but I think it would be pretty cool to have a community of people giving input as to what passages are good to read on a certain topic and provide comments like "If you like this passage I recommend that you also read this one and this one which seem to say the same thing in different terms." If it got rolling it would probably require quite a bit of managing to avoid spamming and inappropriate comments but it could be quite cool and useful. It would also be cool to have a wiki-style community created concordance of topics in Swedenborg's works, which brings me to my final dream...
Hyperlinked Potts' Concordance:I've
posted before about how useful
Pott's Concordance is and I
mentioned recently that you can read and search parts of Potts' Concordance on Google Book Search. But wouldn't it be great if there were a site where you could read and search the whole concordance and read the full text of the passages that are excerpted in it with one click? It probably won't happen because of copyright or something but I can dream can't I?
