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Queering Earth

Find a word in the cabinet

Every sheet, every quotation, and every correction.

This is the finding aid. It searches the whole cabinet — the eight sheets, the colophon, the privacy policy, and every entry in the accession register — and it lands you on the section, not the top of the page. The searching happens inside your browser, so it needs JavaScript; what you type is never sent to a server, ours or anybody’s. If the field is not working, the whole cabinet is listed in full further down, and that needs nothing.

The whole cabinet Link to this section

Every page on the site and every section of it, in the order a reader might meet them. This list is generated from the pages themselves by tools/make-search-index.mjs and written into this sheet between two markers — the same way the typefaces are declared in the stylesheet. Nobody types it, so no heading here can drift from the heading it names.

The readings

The cabinet itself

How this searches, and what it refuses to do Link to this section

A quotation is never cropped. This is the one rule the whole feature is built around. The characteristic failure of a site like this one is not an invented source — it is a tightened one: a sentence trimmed to fit, with the attribution still attached. An ordinary search snippet is a machine for producing exactly that, twenty words at a time. So quoted text is held apart from ours here: when a result matches inside a quotation, you get the whole quotation with its maker and its citation, or you do not get it at all.

Our own prose is cropped, and marked as cropped. Commentary is windowed around the match with an ellipsis either side, because that is our writing and a reader can go and see the rest. Where one of our sentences has a short quotation set inside it, the window widens rather than cut into it.

The register is filed second. The accession register is more than a quarter of the words on this site, so ranked flat it would bury the sheets on any search naming a writer. Its entries come under their own heading, after the sheets — the same front-matter and back-matter distinction the register itself makes.

An attribution we have retracted is not indexed. Where a sheet shows a correction, only the restored half is searchable. Plain text has no way to say this is the reading we got wrong, so an indexed one would surface as though it were the live attribution. The correction is still findable: the register describes it in ordinary prose, and that is the right place to land.

Nothing you type is stored or sent. There is no query string, because a query string would be written into our host’s access log; the search term lives in the part of the address after the #, which browsers never send to a server. Nothing is remembered between visits. See what this site knows about you, which is almost nothing and now says so about this page too.

Provenance Mounted . Not yet corrected.