Introduction to the Concordance CD …and the world of concording
Note: this page was written for the CD release of the Concordance which includes material not found on-line. It’s preserved on the website because some is still useful and it will give you a reason to order the CD. There is more on the CD, and it is much faster, than what is offered on-line.
There are two “Web” Concordances in html on this CD, one includes only the “Sub-Urtext” Text which is volume one of the ACIM canon. The other includes the HLC version of volume one and the Sub-Urtext versions of all other volumes. Eventually the plan is to make all of this material available in highly accurate, fully proofed form. At the moment, only the HLC is “fully proofed” and the rest of the material is in varying stages short of “finished.” Despite these shortcomings, these are the most accurate copies of the documents known to us, and are more useful for students than the less accurate copies in widespread circulation that we began with. By the way, “fully proofed” doesn’t mean there are no mistakes. It means there were ten proofreading passes. It is still likely that a few sneaky little mistakes are hiding in there!
Each of the Concordances allows for simple word searches, word proximity searches, and full phrase searches. In the 6-volume Concordance, this extends across the whole of the ACIM canon. Each is referenced by chapter, section, and paragraph as well as original manuscript page numbers and in the Sub-Ur, we’ve added the HLC chapter and section breaks. Each volume has a Table of Contents. This provides for many different ways to locate, almost instantly, any particular passage or spot in the material by many different criteria.
We had initially planned to release the HLC Concordance by itself as a first step. However, when the proofing of that volume was completed in the Spring of 2006, we realized that adding the other volumes increased the usefulness of the Concordance so much, we decided to delay release a few months to do preliminary proofing on those volumes and add them to the first release. While the HLC is FULLY proofed, the other volumes are not so thoroughly proofed. There won’t be many mistakes, but there will be a few we haven’t yet caught.
At every stage, and at this moment, there are enhancements to the product which could be made quite easily in a few days or weeks, and the choice must be made as to whether to delay the release to add yet one more feature or to release it now as it is. While it will be better when new features are added, it is very useful as it is and it is not useful at all if you don’t have it! So we are making the first release now of a product that is far from perfect, but also very useful nevertheless.
In addition to the Web Concordances in html, there are two “full Concordances” which can only be used with R.J.C. Watt’s magnificent Concordance software.
http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/
A 30 day “trial” version of the software is included on the CD. So are the data files produced by that software from the same data used for the Web Concordances. This is not the place for a tutorial on the use of this software, but suffice it to say that much more powerful search and sorting tools are available with this software than in the Web Concordances alone. While the latter provide most of the most commonly used search features, any serious scholar of ACIM will find Watt’s software to be indispensable, and its purchase is highly recommended. On this CD is a short introduction to the basics of concording by Willard McCarty, King’s College, London. It includes screen shots from the Full Concordance software and a good overview of Concordance basics. Press HERE for that article.
To install the free trial software, simply click on the filename (conc320.exe) in Windows Explorer and follow the prompts. To load the Concordances into Watt’s software, after installation, similarly click on the file TEXT\allsix.txt.Concordance for the six volume Concordance, or URCONC\URCOCNC13.txt.Concordance for the Sub-Ur from Windows Explorer.
The Sub-Urtext (text only) unproofed Concordance
The Sub-Urtext Concordance is highly inaccurate, as we are just at the first stages of proofing that material. It is only being included here for the purposes of proofreading and because, despite its many shortcomings, it is more accurate and more useful than any other copy of the Sub-Ur known to us. The Sub-Ur (commonly mis-named “Urtext”) is particularly difficult material to use for a variety of reasons. This Concordance, despite its not having been thoroughly proofed yet, is still a huge benefit to the student who wishes to research this material.
Due to the severe inaccuracy of the Sub-Urtext text, we’ve added a feature that allows the user, with a single keystroke, to compare any original manuscript page to the unproofed copy (or “capture”) of that manuscript on which the Concordance is based. It is highly recommended that before believing that anything in the latter is “accurate,” it should be checked against the manuscript because quite often the copy is not accurate. This process of ‘checking’ could take hours, just for a single line, with the raw material as first provided, since there were no text divisions of any kind and not even a single, consistent page numbering system on the Sub-Urtext documents. There were also a number of pages missing and out of sequence.
Considerable work has gone into getting all the pages, and all the pages in the right place, and numbering them in a single consistent manner such that reference to the material is now possible. In addition, the chapter and section breaks from the HLC have been retro-fitted to the Sub-Urtext, also to facilitate cross-referencing and for the purposes of creating a matrix for the Concordance annotation system.
The Sub-Ur Concordance will be used for proofreading, and is, I repeat, FULL OF ERRORS, and is provided not because it is finished or fully corrected, but because despite its many known flaws, it is still useful. It is probably about 97% correct which means that the vast majority of the time, a “lookup” will be successful and, with the original manuscript right there to instantly compare, any errors can be quickly identified and corrected. The first few chapters have been partly proofed and have only a few minor errors. The later chapters were based not on a “capture” of the Sub-Ur manuscript, but on the HLC manuscript. While the two are mostly identical, those who did the “capture” didn’t find and correct all the discrepancies. As a result this copy frequently is closer to the HLC than the Ur. Ergo … always check the manuscript page with this unproofed version.
The HLC Six Volume Concordance
The Six Volume Concordance based on the HLC Text is highly accurate in Volume 1, incompletely proofed in Volume II, and “pretty good” in the other volumes. The proofing on all these materials continues. In this Concordance your search extends across all six volumes of the ACIM canon. The only thing “missing” really is that material in the earlier versions which was omitted by Helen Schucman and William Thetford in this, the HLC version of the text. When the Sub-Ur is fully proofed, in a year or two at the current rate of progress and with the current budget, that material will be incorporated. When the original notebooks are available, and we don’t know when that will be, well that material will be incorporated too. This is part of an on-going project and is by no means finished and is by no means the last word!
Both Concordances use a simplified and more consistent implementation of the FIP annotation system which divides the whole of the canon into Volumes, Chapters, Sections and Paragraphs with a high degree of consistency across all volumes. Thus any paragraph can be designated with four fields, and with a very few exceptions they always contain the same kind of data making the system very easy to use in contrast to the FIP floating field system where several fields may contain up to six different kinds of data resulting in a system that is cumbersome and awkward for experts and impossibly confusing and useless for novices. (see Preface and Introduction to the Corrected HLC: Annotation). In addition, these references, based as they are on top level natural divisions in the text, are usable on any edition of any version of ACIM in which those basic chapter and section divisions occur, insofar as the material in question is present in that version in the same location. It is thus a ‘universal’ reference system to the maximum extent physically possible.
In addition each volume is referenced according to original manuscript page numbers, so you can always see what the original manuscript page is and we include copies of the originals so you can always quickly and easily check the “copy” in type against the “photocopy” of the manuscript in pictorial form. Every time you do that you’re “proofreading” and every time you find a discrepancy and report it, you’ve become a contributor to the project.
So there are two reference systems in use, both of which are simpler and easier than the FIP system, and both are recommended to all who publish editions of ACIM in the future!!
The Sub-Urtext is additionally referenced to the HLC chapter and section breaks to make comparisons between the two easier.
In the Concordance interface the user has access to Tables of Contents for each volume. If you know the chapter and section you wish to consult, using these, you can “click” to the spot in the material you want in any volume in a few seconds.
A bit of history …
When the “earlier versions” of ACIM emerged in the form of photocopies of old manuscripts in late 1999 and early 2000, the need to render these into accurate computer files was instantly recognized and quickly acted upon. Within weeks of the first discovery of these documents, they’d been scanned, put through optical character recognition software, and were made available as word-processor files. All of us owe a great deal of gratitude to those who did this and I’d name them and give them credit here save that they’ve asked me not to.
Like every version of ACIM to appear previously, however, they weren’t properly or fully proofread! They contained many errors, some of them being inadvertent errors in the originals themselves, some of them being errors introduced by mistake in the copying and scanning process. In some cases there are uncorrected “Scribal errors” where corrections were dictated but not made, and in a few cases there are errors introduced by previous editors.
The need for precisely accurate copies was apparent to most, but the huge amount of work involved in actually proofreading such a large volume of material discouraged many.
It was also immediately obvious that there were huge differences between the earlier manuscripts and the later versions, but just identifying these differences, never mind evaluating them, was a huge task, especially when working with un-indexed, un-referenced, un-paginated, inaccurate copies!
Controversy raged about the significance of the “differences” but no one on earth then or now actually knows what they all are! How can one claim, as many do, that “there are no important differences” if one hasn’t even looked at all the differences? It is unquestionably true that many differences are of no great significance, but a few that I’ve found are rather important!
While reading the old photocopies was easy enough, as their legibility is generally quite good, the application of computers to textual comparison had to wait for accurate machine-readable copies.
Three years ago, thinking it might take me a few months, I set out to proofread just one volume, the “Hugh Lynn Cayce version” (HLC) of the text. Most of the first year was spent learning how to reliably proofread this kind of material using computers rather than human assistants. The proofreading of the HLC Text was completed in June of 2006, and by October, the Workbook, Manual, Use of Terms, Psychotherapy and Song of Prayer volumes had all been proofed through at least two passes. While many more passes are needed for perfection, two passes is enough to clean up about 99% of the problems. While this isn’t “finished” it is “good enough” to make the material useful.
We have found our mechanized proofing techniques achieve up to 95% accuracy on a single pass. That is to say that if there are 100 errors in a document, we’ll miss at least five of them on a single proofing pass. The first pass is always the slowest and most difficult because in it nearly all the mistakes are found and must be corrected. The subsequent passes are more like looking for a needle in a haystack because there are few errors left, and those ones are often hard to spot. Beginning with a few thousand mistakes, there are only a few hundred by the second pass, perhaps a dozen by the third, and only a handful after the fourth.
What’s on this CD is a Concordance which contains the full text of all six volumes of ACIM with both “earlier” manuscripts of the Text, the HLC and the so-called “Urtext” (which we call the Sub-Urtext). The HLC is “fully” proofed, ten passes, no errors found on the last pass. This means there probably aren’t many left but no one should suppose that there might not be a few that have been overlooked ten times. The Workbook has been proofed only twice, which should bring it to roughly a 99% accuracy rate. This means there are certainly a number of, probably mostly minor, errors remaining. The other volumes have been proofed through four passes, which means there may be some, but very few and probably mostly very minor errors left. The Sub-Urtext version of the text has only been “lightly proofed” with only chapter one having been given a single, complete pass. It is known to be severely riddled with errors. It is also “the best that is currently available,” and despite these shortcomings, is still useful, which is why we include it with these many many caveats!