Current Release: 4.0 | Release Date: August 2015 | Status: RELEASED | Text Count: 4929 (+1600 new and changed titles)

Current Release: 3.0 | Release Date: October 2014 | Status: RELEASED | Text Count: 3507 (+800 new and changed titles)

Prior Release: 2.0 | Release Date: March 2014 | Status: RELEASED | Text Count: 2712 (+500 new and changed titles)

Prior Release: 1.1 | Release Date: August 2013 | Status: UPDATED | Text Count: 2315

Release 4 all-inclusive searchable-and-sortable manifest (Excel)

The Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) is an open source text project, focused on book-length texts, in English, covering Spiritualism, the occult, New Thought and allied parasciences (mesmerism, magnetism, phrenology, alchemy, chiromancy and so forth) published between 1790 and 1940. Currently the SSOC consists of more than 3,500 book-length texts (more than 2.1 million pages) by over 300 authors, and includes many of the texts considered "classics" in Spiritualism and the occult. Every text in the SSOC is supplied, free of charge, in indexed PDF form, allowing it to be electronically stored, searched, printed and converted (to image, HTML or text). The outer, later bound of the corpus is limited by copyright law.

The intent behind this project is to provide, at low cost, a more or less complete document database of important primary book-length materials -- again, in English, at present -- to all academic and non-academic researchers, aficionados, and readers interested in Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences.

The SSOC is a curated project, with regular releases of texts, and plans for the inclusion of fiction, music and other material related to Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences. Additionally, work has begun on collecting texts in national languages other than English.

The SSOC can be used as a library: texts can be drawn from it on an ad hoc basis. But, by design, the SSOC is a database, structured to sit underneath a full-text retrieval engine (like Windows Search, OS X Spotlight, Foxtrot, Copernic or X Search) to enable researchers, aficionados and readers to find all relevant materials on a particular topic at local search engine speeds, and draw materials from an owned local copy of the SSOC.

The SSOC is also suitable for use as the basis for text processing applications -- named-entity recognition tools, social network analysis tools, lexical analysis tools -- that can consumer either PDF files or the text or HTML files that PDFs can produce. Some text processing projects -- named entity extraction and the production of high-fidelity machine-readable text versions of the SSOC documents -- are planned by the SSOC team; please coordinate your work with the team so that there's no duplication of effort.

Additionally, an online search engine that searches ONLY the SSOC corpus is effectively available, via Google, using the "site:ssoc.selfip.com" argument in a Google Search, as in the example below.

This option may be suitable for occasional users who are interested in pinpointing a selection of texts to download, but is not intended as a substitute for an owned local copy of the entire SSOC.

You can also use the Search option in the top bar of this page to access a search facility that can be made SSOC-specific.

Access to the SSOC has additional benefits, including the ability to check others' citations and re-establish the context lost through conventional citational apparatus easily, as well as the ability to fact-check and test assertions made about aspects of Spiritualist, occult and parascientific discourse between the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the Second World War.

There are three ways you can get a copy of the current version of the SSOC:

1. You can join the SSOC syndication, by adding the SSOC to your Google Drive. You do that by clicking here, and adding the SSOC directory to your Google Drive. This Google Drive folder and its contents will not count against your paid Google Drive space, nor do you have to have a paid Google Drive subscription to do this. This is by far the best way to get the SSOC as you get updates live, as the SSOC is updated, rather than waiting for the formal release of the corpus.

   When you do this, and view the corpus in a web browser, Google Drive may tell you there are only 500 documents in the corpus; this is a limitation of Google Drive's web browser interface. If you add the shared folder to your Google Drive, the entire SSOC corpus will be synched to your drive.

   Keep in mind that cloud symchronization requires an Internet connection, and, given the size of the SSOC, will take several days to complete, the first time you do it. Thereafter, synchronization is very rapid, as only new and changed files are synchronized.

2. You can download the entire SSOC, at your leisure. To do this, you need a web harvesting application, or a script that can make use of the SSOC manifest.
3. You can arrange, with IAPSOP, to have a USB hard drive populated with the current release of the SSOC. Typically, users who choose this option are bandwidth-constrained, and cannot afford the time or money associated with downloading the SSOC corpus -- currently, about 100 gigabytes (GB) in size -- to their machine. Instead, these users will arrange to have a 500 GB or 1 terabyte (TB) USB hard drive shipped to IAPSOP (often via Amazon) at the address at the top of this page, typical for a cost of roughly $100, as a "gift", specifying on the "gift card" (a) what address the hard drive is to be shipped to after copying and (b) whether the drive is to be formatted for Windows, OS X or Linux. IAPSOP will, as time permits, copy the SSOC corpus to the hard drive, and then mail the drive to the address specified on the "gift card." To do this, send SSOC a note.

Because the SSOC contains literally hundreds of texts that are otherwise available to users primarily through expensive reprint-house editions, access to the SSOC can save you a significant amount of money while simultaneously giving you searchable documents that are also suitable for printing (via for example the PDF printing and binding capabilities of your local Kinkos/Fedex facility).

The manifest of the current SSOC (R4) is also available, below, if you want to cherry-pick texts.

If you have questions that are not answered by the material provided, if you find a bug in the SSOC distribution, if you have concerns or issues with the corpus, or if you have book length primary material to contribute to the SSOC, feel free to contact the SSOC maintenance team at ssoc@iapsop.com.