Searchable Seth database & automated citations

That was hilarious :laughing:

Look, let’s just all sort our beliefs in money out so that we win the lottery, then we’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 we’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 you’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 it’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 don’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 Rob’s and Laurel’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 “Sethdom” from her and you’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. Don’t read too much into this as there is no open “for sale” 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 I’m talking about doesn’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 can’t actually copy it.
This will make an enormous resource.

So far, I’ve been able to copy everything Seth on the net I’ve come across and that’s at least 30 to 40 Seth-related sites. Only online books cannot be copied, e-books…ron

Well this isn’t actually true at all, they just can’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 don’t really understand what you’re getting at. It’s hardly news to me that you’ve bought a bunch of Seth memorabilia, it’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 I’ll quote Indiana Jones and say ‘it should be in a museum!’ It was just a theoretical proposal, only half serious. Is is that ‘grandiose’ 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 don’t have as a kindle. This evening I decided to look up ‘brain’ in the ES8… 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:

It’s quite nice isn’t it? Kindle search actually works on the PC as well as the Mac. (Online as well I believe.) You’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 Kindle’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 don’t know what book a bit of information is in, or they don’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 don’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 wouldn’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 (“dreams” vs. “dream”) wouldn’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 wouldn’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 Kindle’s existing search features. :wink:

Hi Chris,

The project you have in mind would be a labor of love ! Still,I do not kow how one can by-pass at some point needing to buy some of the books or even if one ought to. No serious seth student can live by quotes alone :-). Its true with kindle one can only search on book at a time but what a difference it makes from using that stone age thing called an ‘index’ :-(. Its all new to me so yes the kindle thingy would be on PC too

The context aware feature would help, though that is somewhat adressed by having the kindle quote in its context and being able to read backwards and forward.

The only down side of Kindle is that one has to have the device, the app, and the money.If you can do what you have in mind without triggering a ‘wailing and a gnashing of teeth’ over copyright you shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

My next trick is to see how if I can find an app to turn a kindle book into an audio file, cos ain’t nobody reading TES on youtube yet and some of those TES books are dense, esp 8 & 9.

The stuff I found on the brain last night kept me awake, the brain awakening like a leviathan

The search engine is only for finding content in the books, not actually delivering that content. The book is still needed, but you can find which book and where and search them all simultaneously. It would link to the relevant section within the Kindle book.

You may find the video I posted in the main thread interesting, I’m fairly knowledgeable about copyright given licensing is something all software developers have to deal with. I actually consider this bit the very least challenging.

what! No Cookies in the Cookie Jar! then what is the point of the search engine if it doesn’t give me what I want :slight_smile:

Chris:

Excerpts would be limited so as not to dissuade purchase of the actual book

Rachel: If the excerpt is at least one paragraph, then I think you’ve come up with the ‘perfect’ search engine. I have almost all the books, and sometimes wonder where I saw what, :-)) … plus my interests change…

just came across this posting. I very much like and would support this endeavor. Do you have any update on where you stand regarding these plans? Are you working on implementing this idea or have you given up on it?

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Last time I began this I had a very specific question about how to layout the content for indexing in Haystack that no one seemed very able to answer. It was something I could have definitely figured out myself but I was annoyed that it would require the extra effort.

I was also very new to Django at the time.

Now I’m not only much more experienced with Django but I’ve also learned a fair bit of Ruby which is the language this discussion forum is written in, and also very well suited for web applications. I’ve also written Ruby code to specifically work with the database these forums use.

I will definitely be creating this database, on my life!

I am wrapping up some projects and then I will approach this again. Instead of Django and Haystack I should look at what text search solutions are available for Ruby on Rails. Either way I’m much more prepared for this project now.

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Sounds good. I personally don’t have programming experience but like the idea of creating a searchable database of Seth material very much. I would be happy if I can support the effort in other ways or at least encourage you to follow through on the idea.

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And so it was! Seth search engine.

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