How to use this edition

Reading

The work is in three volumes, each divided into parts and chapters. Start from the home page, or press Ctrl + K (⌘ + K on a Mac) or use Find a chapter in the header (the magnifier on a phone) to jump to any chapter by its title or number.

Every paragraph is numbered. A reference such as II-11 ¶25 means Volume II, chapter 11, paragraph 25. Click a paragraph number to copy a link that opens the chapter at exactly that paragraph.

Beside the text each chapter keeps the apparatus of the original edition: the Outline of its sections, the Proverbs and sayings it contains, and the Terms — names, places, and Dagbanli words. On a phone or tablet, open them with the Contents button at the bottom of the screen. Most entries link to the place in the text where they appear.

Mark my place remembers the paragraph you are reading, and the home page offers to take you back to it. Your place is kept in this browser; to carry it across devices, use the cloud button in the header to get an email sign-in link. That is the only thing an account is used for.

The moon and sun button switches between light and dark reading, and on larger screens the S / M / L / XL buttons change the text size. Both are remembered on this device.

Searching

Search looks through every paragraph of all three volumes. A plain search finds paragraphs containing any of your words and ranks the best matches first: paragraphs with your exact wording come to the top, followed by those with the most matching words. Names and Dagbanli words are matched as written, and English words also find their other forms — drum finds “drums” and “drumming”.

To narrow a search, use these operators, alone or together:

• "the forbidden talks" — quotation marks match that exact phrase, with the words in that order.
• -funeral — a minus sign directly before a word leaves out every paragraph containing it.
• "lunsi" "drummers" — putting single words in quotation marks makes each of them required.

As soon as a search contains quotation marks or a minus sign, every quoted word or phrase must appear and every excluded word must be absent. Advanced search builds these queries for you from the Must contain, Exact phrase, and Must NOT contain fields, and shows the query it will run. Exclusions narrow a search, so at least one word or phrase to look for is needed.

With operators, words are matched exactly as written: -funeral leaves out “funeral” but not “funerals”. When a form or spelling matters, include its variants too.

While you type in a search box, a bar of Dagbanli characters appears beneath it — ɛ ɣ ŋ ɔ ʒ ʼ — so you can enter names exactly as the text spells them, such as Dagbaŋ.

Asking questions

Ask answers questions in plain language using only passages retrieved from the work. It gathers the paragraphs that best match your question, together with the paragraphs either side of them for context, and writes an answer from those alone — it is instructed not to add general knowledge from elsewhere.

Every factual statement carries a citation such as [II-11 ¶25]; each one is a link to the paragraph it comes from, and the passages consulted are listed under the answer. Answers may label their evidence:

• Explicitly stated — the work says so directly.
• Supported synthesis — a conclusion drawn from several passages, each cited.
• Not established in the retrieved passages — the passages found do not settle the question.

Where the work gives more than one version of a tradition, the answer should present each version with its own citations. The assistant can still misread a passage, so treat its answers as a guide to the text and check the cited paragraphs before relying on them. If it finds nothing, try naming a specific person, place, or term, or use Search.

To keep the service available to everyone, each visitor can ask up to 20 questions an hour.

Citing a passage

The paragraph references are stable, so a passage can be cited precisely. Give the work, the paragraph reference, and the link copied from the paragraph number, for example:

Chernoff, John M., and Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai. A Drummer’s Testament: Dagbamba Society and Culture in the Twentieth Century, II-11 ¶25. Digital edition.

The text is reproduced without alteration from the original edition. See About this edition for how it was made and the terms on which it may be used.