SearchTrek: Fandom’s Own Library Computer
Website lets fans search scripts up through "Star Trek: Enterprise"
Maybe you’ve been wondering forever just how often Captain Picard told someone to, “Make it so.”
Or in which episode some bit of remembered dialogue appeared.
Perhaps you've had this bet with your Star Trek buddy and no amount of random googling has satisfied.
Now, there's a website for you, SearchTrek.org
The site, which just went live in the last week or so, was a little project by Rob Dawson, a software developer in the UK.
The result is fandom's own library computer, of sorts.
SearchTrek is actually Rob’s second sci-fi database site.
“A few years ago I contacted Chrissie, the owner of chakoteya.net, to ask whether I could use the Doctor Who scripts she had transcribed for a web project and she agreed, you can see the result here: doctorwhoogle.com
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“I had some time off work recently and so contacted Chrissie again to see what she thought of the idea of a similar project using her Star Trek scripts and once again she said yes,” Rob added during a recent online interview. “Actually building the new site didn't take too long because I just re-used a lot of the code from doctorwhoogle.com”
He hopes that the new site helps fans with what seems like their insatiable desire for detail.
“I made the site because I just enjoy building cool stuff online and I thought people might appreciate it. I think there are many rich troves of data online that would be so much more useful if they were just easier to access and work with, so building a simple search interface for something like this seemed worthwhile,” he said. “As for how or why people will use it - I have no idea really!
“Without wishing to stereotype too much, I think a lot of science fiction fans are very detail-oriented, they love lists and facts and research, so I think the site will appeal to that kind of person,” he added.
Rob gave a glimpse on how SearchTrek works.
“I wrote some Python code to copy down all the scripts from chakoteya.net, then some other code to ‘parse’ them (picking out the spoken words which should be searchable, from the descriptive text etc which should not) and then stored the results in a database,” Rob said. “When you search for a word the database finds any exact matches as well as similar related words, for example searching for ‘transporter’ will also find occurrences of ‘transport,’ ‘transporting’ etc - I think that makes it more useful.”
He included all the scripts which were available on chakoteya.net.
“Yes it includes everything up to Enterprise, but nothing from the newer series yet. I included all the scripts that were available from chakoteya, if new scripts get added there in the future I will include them on my site as well,” he said.
SearchTrek is purely an amateur fan project, Rob said.
“If anyone wants to show appreciation for the site I would ask them to send a Paypal donation to the owner of chakoteya.net, you can find her details on that site,” he added.
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