How to use TIR

Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (TIR) has nine content categories, most of which are listed in the contents menu in the sidebar on the left. Their mutual interrelations are illustrated in the chart below.

Every category page lists all the items in that category (museums, inscriptions, morphemes, ...) in a table. Each of these items has its own page, which contains all relevant information about the item in question, and provides links to all immediately related items as depicted in the chart. For example, on an inscription page, you will find links to the characters used and the words written, as well as to the object which bears the inscription. If you continue to one of the word pages, you will find a list of inscriptions in which this word occurs, as well as links to the morphemes and phonemes it contains, etc. You can access the content pages from all item pages which belong to the respective category by clicking on the category's name at the very bottom of the page, via the shortcuts in the contents menu, or via the list on Raetica.

To take full advantage of all the information made available in TIR, use also the property pages. Every item has certain properties (e.g., condition, [[Property:direction|writing direction), which are listed in tabular form on the respective page. The easiest way of accessing the property page is by clicking on its name, e.g., craftsmanship on an inscription page. The property page contains a list of available values – telling you, in this case, which methods of applying inscriptions were used in Raetic inscriptions –, definitions, maps, and statistics.

The bibliography displays a complete list of all the literature referred to in TIR. Every entry includes a list of pages for which the reference is used, i.e. every inscription, object or general topic with which the work is concerned. All references cited on pages link to the full bibliography, but a list of used references is given at the bottom of each page separately. The concordance lists corresponding inscription sigla in the most important editions (PID, IR, LIR, MLR).

Under the header Raetica, you can find a general introduction to the study of Raetic, including definitions and information about the scope of the database, as well as overview texts containing summarised information on the various aspects of the Raetic corpus, e.g., research history, onomastics, etc. These provide the necessary background for the collected data and can be used to put the latter into context.

For information about transliteration conventions, see Property:character.

The sidebar menu in the second box from above is concerned with navigation and search. The index is useful for finding all pages on which an item is mentioned. The links on the item pages will show only directly related pages, e.g., the page of a morpheme links to all words in which this morpheme occurs, but the index will also list all references to the morpheme in commentaries and in the summary texts. The MediaWiki semantic search for objects and inscriptions can be conducted with the help of forms ("Object query", "Inscription query"). More complex searches can be performed manually via the "Advanced search"-button. The direct "Search" bar is useful for short-cuts to pages whose precise names are known or for rough in-text searches; it does not perform a semantic search.