Searchable Seth database & automated citations

Continuing the discussion from What exactly is reality creation?:

I am strongly considering building one, because I have the means. I think I could also do it in such a way that allows search but doesnā€™t give away the material in its entirety (as that would clearly violate copyright). I was also considering integrating it with this forum if I do build one, so that typing ā€œSession 315ā€ or whatever will reference the book and chapter when you highlight your mouse over it, and so forth.

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Wow, being able to search a phrase rather than just a single word would be amazing.
I would be very interested in helping on such a project.
Hmmmm . . . annual membership fees may someday surpass royalty income from such an endeavour.
Just thinking out loud :smile:

Not just a phrase but much more complicated queries as well.
No fees (ever).

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Phrases would be great.
So often we remember the quote, we just need the reference.
We would not need to copy/paste anything for that ability.
Just search the phrase and note the session number.
My that would make a powerful tool.
Need someone with the knowing about copyright issues to determine what we could do legally in this regard.

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That would be all kinds of awesome @chris!!!

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ā€œUSEā€!!! lol, That was great! I guess weā€™re good to go then, ha!!

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Iā€™m typing out pages from The Early Session in an attempt to wrap my mind around the three dilemmas of ATI. Let me know when and if it would be appropriate to add the material here. Iā€™m working on session 138 at present, and OMG.

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That was hilarious :laughing:

Look, letā€™s just all sort our beliefs in money out so that we win the lottery, then weā€™ll drive a truckload of money over to whoever owns the copy-RIGHT and buy the Seth material off them wholesale. Then start a Google Books scale scanning operation to get every word digitised, @Chris can work his magic and create the database, and weā€™ll turn the whole thing over to the public searchable and free for eternity.

Sound good?

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Some exciting news, it occurred to me that much like the way a cellphone can identify a song youā€™re listening to, and YouTube can identify copyright video within an hour even though their bandwidth is unfathomably huge and their corpus of registered media is massive, I can use the same rolling-hash technology to automatically identify any and all Seth material quotes posted no matter how partial and automatically provide an accurate citation. Significantly simpler than audio and video fingerprint matching, all I have to do is implement the Rabin-Karp algorithm. This is the same technology colleges use to automatically detect plagiarism.

Anyway this project may take some time and is directly related to a searchable database. But I can definitely do it. So itā€™s on the roadmap.

Edit: for those of you offering to contribute, no worries, transcription will not be necessary for this project

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Once more for those who donā€™t know and perhaps have grandiose ideas about the further dissemination of Seth; Laurel tells me that she owns, holds the copyrights to all the Seth material which Rob lovingly, legally left to her. While alive, Rob licensed selected publishers, along with Rick Stack for example, to reproduce for profit selected portions of the Seth material in exchange for royalties as that was Robā€™s and Laurelā€™s only means of income. Rob and Laurel did not get rich by any stretch of the imagination as getting the information out was paramount. They did what they felt best.

Now that Rob is gone, Laurel is in charge. I may say that I have been very, very fortunate to have purchased significant ā€œSethdomā€ from her and youā€™ve seen what all I have so far. I would say in the spirit of Seth, any endeavor would involve a reality creation that benefits all involved either financially or spiritually, above board. No one has lasting success at the expense of, taking undue advantage of another. I will say that everything is for sale, it is just a matter of price. Donā€™t read too much into this as there is no open ā€œfor saleā€ sign in Sayre, PA. ron

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I realize this reply was directed at Martin but I just thought I had better clarify that the project Iā€™m talking about doesnā€™t involve distributing any of the Seth material to anyone whatsoever. Perhaps very tiny non-copyable contextual hints. As a software developer quite familiar with licensing I understand copyright better than most.

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What we are talking about is similar to a reference library.
You can lookup the information and take notes, but you canā€™t actually copy it.
This will make an enormous resource.

So far, Iā€™ve been able to copy everything Seth on the net Iā€™ve come across and thatā€™s at least 30 to 40 Seth-related sites. Only online books cannot be copied, e-booksā€¦ron

Well this isnā€™t actually true at all, they just canā€™t be copied with ease (or legally). If the computer screen can display it to human eyes, it can be copied. I feel like this is going off-topic though.

Ron, I donā€™t really understand what youā€™re getting at. Itā€™s hardly news to me that youā€™ve bought a bunch of Seth memorabilia, itā€™s kind of hard to avoid that fact when viewing Fans on Facebook. Personally I have no interest whatsoever in a chair, and sure the Seth portrait is nice to have, but Iā€™ll quote Indiana Jones and say ā€˜it should be in a museum!ā€™ It was just a theoretical proposal, only half serious. Is is that ā€˜grandioseā€™ to purchase something off the current owner and then make it freely available, just as an idea? Pretty sure its been done before.

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Laws makes us all criminals

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Having had much satisfaction with kindle on the Ipad, i downloaded Kindle for the desktop/lap top. Its almost magical. There are onky a few sethbooks I donā€™t have as a kindle. This evening I decided to look up ā€˜brainā€™ in the ES8ā€¦ WOW!!!. each enetry comes on the side bar and I still have a full screen to read the page. On the ipad the excerpts and the search results slightly overlap- though there must be away to adjust this.

The reason why I knew someone somewhere must be doing this is that I have noticed in many seth groups large extracts/new extracts being posted from the kindle editions and I guessed/assumed no one was painfully typing them out.

I cannot see anyone duplicating what kindle does so well. its simple

1-Get the kindle app
2-purchase the ebook via amazon
3-upload the ebook
4-search for anything you want, all day long

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Good afternoon Bella. At least in my location. :wink:

Itā€™s quite nice isnā€™t it? Kindle search actually works on the PC as well as the Mac. (Online as well I believe.) Youā€™re right, myself and some others quote extensively from it on the forum.

To search the entire Seth material via Kindle you would need to either know what book contained the information and own the book, or own every book and diligently search every book. You would also need to know the exact phrase used. Otherwise you would need to multiply the time spent scanning through Kindleā€™s search results by every book and then again by every possible permutation of the phrase. This could easily occupy an entire evening and even then you might not find it. But at least thanks to Kindle it would not take months!

Often folks donā€™t know what book a bit of information is in, or they donā€™t own every book (but might want to purchase the one their information is in) or they would like to retrieve that information across the entire Seth material. Most often they donā€™t know the precise phrase used, only the topic, but searching a single topic word would involve clicking on each result and reading a great deal of context, again multiply this time by every Seth book.

The search engine I would create would be:

  • Free, you wouldnā€™t need to own any of the books. Excerpts would be limited so as not to dissuade purchase of the actual book (in fact it would encourage purchase) and to abide by U.S. copyright law (where myself and the server are located).

  • Public. Anyone in the world would have easy access with minimal barriers (no registration with Amazon/Kindle to login, purchase, and download the book before they could begin searching).

  • Comprehensive. It would search all published material.

  • Flexible. Exact phrases and spelling would be unnecessary. Proper pluralization (ā€œdreamsā€ vs. ā€œdreamā€) wouldnā€™t be necessary.

  • Context aware. If you wanted to search for a paragraph or chapter that talked about both out of body projections and dreams you could do so - the words wouldnā€™t need to be directly adjacent to each other.

  • Advanced. You could easily search for multiple phrases, like "astral projection" OR "out of body experience", and you could combine this with the above context awareness: "astral projection" OR "out of body experience" NEAR "dream".

I hope this more in-depth description ignites your excitement and sufficiently contrasts it to Kindleā€™s existing search features. :wink: