BlockSearch: Making Large Files Usable

As competitive debate has transformed from physical to digital, debaters gained access to an enormous volume of evidence. This isn't only a matter of abundant open source and email chain sharing; teams that debated on paper were literally limited by the physical size of evidence that can be carried to tournaments. The best college teams made do with about 10 tubs (~150,000 pages [1]) of evidence. Today, digital storage has exploded these limits—my decade in debate has generated over 54 GB (approximately 2.7 million pages [2]) of evidence.

This volume revolution brings challenges alongside benefits. Judges now expect greater specificity in arguments, while debaters struggle with massive files that load slowly and interrupt prep time. Traditional organizational systems like alphabetical filing break down when trying to quickly locate specific evidence—is Arctic Biodiversity under "A" for Arctic, or "E" for Environment? Precious seconds are wasted.

In short, the evolution that liberated us from physical constraints has created new organizational challenges. To manage them, we need something new: search for our blocks.

This post will teach you how to use a piece of software that does just that, helping you organize information. I've shared a few utilities that only marginally streamline debate prep. This is not that. Mastering this tool has the potential to save you minutes of in-round or pre-round prep at a time, putting otherwise difficult-to-reach evidence at your fingertips.

You can download it at this link.

Use the BlockSearch .exe if you're on windows, and the .dmg if you're on MacOS. If you would like to test out the functionality before setting up your own files, I have included a small sample index for you to experiment with. I will add a demonstration video walking you through how to use the program to this page shortly.

Setting Up Block Search

Before you can effectively use Block Search, you'll need to set up the application and prepare your evidence files by breaking them down into searchable components. This preparation process varies slightly between Windows and macOS versions, but both follow a similar principle: converting large Word documents into smaller, searchable units and telling the search app where to look.

Windows

1. Download and run the application: You may need to give the application custom approval for antivirus, much like with Verbatim itself.
2. Set up your block index:
   • Open Block Search and navigate to Document Tools → Split Document by Headings. This opens the Document Splitter dialog where you'll convert your large files into searchable blocks
   • Select Input Document: Choose your large Word file (like an impact defense file)
   • Choose Template Document: Select a blank Verbatim document to ensure styles are preserved. You can make your own blank document to preserve your custom styles, or download the template doc from the Dropbox link above.
   • Select Heading Level: Choose which heading level to split at. This will create a separate document out of each heading in your source document.
     • Heading 1 will target Pockets
     • Heading 2 will target Hats
     • Heading 3 will target Blocks (most likely to be useful)
     • Heading 4 will target Tags
   • Choose Output Options: Either create individual files or a ZIP archive—useful if you want to share your index with others
   • Select Output Location: Choose where to save your split documents
   • Process Document: Click to start splitting
3. Configure Your Search Folder:
   • Go to Search Settings → Select Search Folder
   • Choose the folder where your split documents were saved
   • Block Search will use this folder as its index
4. Troubleshooting:
   1. If your software isn't launching, you may need to flag it as legitimate for your antivirus. The instructions for doing this are the same as the instructions for approving Verbatim, which you can find here.

macOS

The macOS version is slightly more complicated—in addition to the above steps, you will need to convert your word documents to JSON format:

1. Install the application: Download Block Search and drag it to your Applications folder.
2. Use the Document Splitter:
   • Go to Document Tools → Split Documents by Headings
   • Select Input Document: Choose your large Word file (like an impact defense file)
   • Choose Template Document: Select a blank Verbatim document to ensure styles are preserved. You can make your own blank document to preserve your custom styles, or download the template doc from the Dropbox link above.
   • Select Heading Level: Choose which heading level to split at. This will create a separate document out of each heading in your source document.
     • Heading 1 will target Pockets
     • Heading 2 will target Hats
     • Heading 3 will target Blocks (most likely to be useful)
     • Heading 4 will target Tags
   • Choose Output Options: Either create individual files or a ZIP archive—useful if you want to share your index with others
   • Select Output Location: Choose where to save your split documents
   • Process Document: Click to start splitting
3. Convert Your Documents to JSON:
   • Go to Document Tools → Convert Documents to JSON
   • In the converter dialog:
     • Select Input Folder: Choose the folder containing your Word documents. If you just used the document splitter, select the folder that contains the splitter’s output.
     • Select Output Folder: Choose where to save the converted JSON files
     • Select Template Document: Select a blank Verbatim document to ensure styles are preserved. You can make your own blank document to preserve your custom styles, or download the template doc from the Dropbox link above.
     • Click "Convert" to process your documents
4. Configure Your Search Folder:
   • Go to File → Browse Directory
   • Select the folder containing your converted JSON files
   • Block Search will use this folder as its index
5. Troubleshooting:
   1. If you see a message that MacOS cannot confirm your program is virus free, this is because I have not submitted the program for Apple Certification. You can greenlight the software by going to System Settings → Privacy and Security → scroll down to the bottom, and you will see an option to let BlockSearch “Open Anyway.” You can find Apple's instructions for this process here.
   2. If everything works except for the Doc Splitter, you are likely running the app on an account without administrative privileges.
   3. The program may request some permissions when it opens. These are necessary for the program to interact with Microsoft Word.

Set up Prefixes on Windows

In the Windows version of the app, you can tell the app to search specific subdirectories using prefixes. Let’s say you’ve created an index that includes your impact defense, your theory blocks, and your K answers. Searching for 2AC will give you too many results—many of your blocks will include that word.

Instead, you might want to configure a prefix—say, cb—which tells the program you are only looking in the “Condo Bad” folder. You can do this for any combination of folders, allowing you to streamline increasingly broad aspects of your prep.

Here’s how to set this up:

1. Go to Search Settings → Prefix Configuration → Manage Prefixes
2. Create prefixes for different folders—you might use cb for conditionality bad, k for kritik answers, d for impact defense, and so on.
3. Associate each prefix with specific folders in your evidence directory

Send Blocks to Clipboard or Speech Doc

Now that your files are prepared and Block Search is configured, here's how to use it during speech preparation:

1. Activate Block Search: On Windows, you can press Ctrl+Space (or your custom shortcut). This will bring the app to the foreground and put your cursor in the search field. On Mac, simply select BlockSearch on your dock to bring it into focus. You can use Ctrl+Shift+Space or Command+F to put your cursor in the Search field.
2. Select Target: On Windows, click Send to Open Doc to see a list of your open word documents. On Mac, use the drop-down menu in the bottom right corner. Choose your speech doc. If you don’t see your speech doc in the list, you may need to hit refresh. You will only have to do this once; just like Verbatim speech docs, the target will stay selected until you change or close it.
3. Use Prefix Filtering (Optional, Only on Windows): Begin your search with a prefix to target specific subfolders
4. Select and Insert: Press Enter or click a result to send it to your target!
   1. On Windows, you can choose whether you want to send text to your cursor or the end of the document by default. To toggle between these defaults, use Ctrl+P. To send text to the alternative destination without changing the default, use Ctrl+Enter.

Tips

1. Keep searchability in mind. Remember that you will have to look up your headings later, so be sure to give them descriptive names. Since you’re no longer using the document map to look for them, it can be a good idea to make these heading names quite long so that all versions of the name that might be searched will appear in the results.
   1. Consider including prefixes in your mac filenames, since the macOS version lacks prefix filtering.
2. Use consistent formatting. I will make a separate post in a few days about maintaining style consistency. Inconsistent styles may result in the application malfunctioning.
3. Regular Maintenance. Update your document index periodically (especially after making significant changes to your files). I would recommend doing this before every tournament.

Conclusion

By thoughtfully preparing your files and configuring Block Search, you transform the research access bottleneck into a streamlined system that can pull up precisely the evidence you need in seconds. If you prepare it well, this approach fundamentally changes how debaters interact with their research during preparation time. Rather than navigating through massive files or maintaining multiple documents, you can focus entirely on strategy while Block Search handles the mechanical task of locating and transferring evidence. The initial investment in setting up your files will pay enormous dividends in every round you debate later on.

Works Cited

[1] (25 US Gallons volume of tub / 3.06438097 liters volume of ream of printer paper) * 500 sheets per ream

[2] https://cloudnine.com/ediscoverydaily/electronic-discovery/ediscovery-best-practices-perspective-on-the-amount-of-data-contained-in-1-gigabyte/#:~:text=A