Matthew N. Hannah

Antconc

Unzip the download if necessary, and launch the application.

Sample Corpus: Download and extract the zip file of Austen novels.

Navigate to Antconc

Select your operating system:

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There are 7 tabs across the top:

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Concordance: This will show you what’s known as a Keyword in Context view (abbreviated KWIC, more on this in a minute), using the search bar below it.

Concordance Plot: This will show you a very simple visualization of your KWIC search, where each instance will be represented as a little black line from beginning to end of each file containing the search term.

File View: This will show you a full file view for larger context of a result.

Clusters: This view shows you words which very frequently appear together.

Collocates: Clusters show us words which _definitely _appear together in a corpus; collocates show words which are statistically likely to appear together.

Word list: All the words in your corpus.

Keyword List: This will show comparisons between two corpora.

##Performing Analysis

  1. File > Create Quick Corpus

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  1. Navigate to corpus folder

  2. Have a look at the tool settings.

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  1. Start with a basic search. Key words in context will search for the words either to the left, right, or both of the search term.

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  1. Try searching using
  2. Try searching for collocates, words associated with our search term.

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  1. You can also look at ngrams where “n” equals number of words directly adjacent to your search word.

  2. Try comparing corpora. Select corpus manager and Target Corpus.

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  1. Select Raw Files and Add Directory from the Raw Files Corpus Manager. Click Create.

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  1. Now do the same for the Reference Corpus.

  2. Click Create.

  3. A note on statistics. Keyness: this is the frequency of a word in the text when compared with its frequency in a reference corpus, “such that the statistical probability as computed by an appropriate procedure is smaller than or equal to a p value specified by the user.” For those interested in the statistical details, see the section on keyness on p7 of Laurence Anthony’s readme file.