Concordance Program Research Articles

Beyond the concordance Lotus and dBASE as text analysis tools

Concordances are not the only computer tools available to literary scholars. This article looks at two general purpose software packages, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III. Several suggested approaches to organizing the texts are presented. Each program allows the words to have multiple levels — something standard concordance programs lack. This encourages the researcher to view the text as texture rather than as words strung together linearly. Lotus is easier to use than dBase but lacks the ability to relate information between files. With programming skills, the researcher can develop complex queries in dBase.

News

To be or not to be electronic William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, a widely acclaimed, modern spelling publication from Oxford University Press is now available on floppy diskette. All structural information is encoded so that it can be interpreted by the Oxford Concordance Program, a widely used text analysis program. It is aimed specifically at the microcomputer implementation, Micro‐OCP, which is available from Oxford Electronic Publishing. With Micro‐OCP and the Complete Works it is now possible to compile word lists, indexes, and concordances of any of Shakespeare's works with ease.

Book Reviews : Bits, Bytes, and Biblical Studies: A Resource Guide for the Use of Computers in Biblical and Classical Studies

Although focusing on biblical studies, this book is of great value to any social scientist interested in computer-assisted content analysis and text processing. Coverage treats word processing, word concordance programs, online communications series, archaeological programs, and machine-readable text archives. The book is of particular relevance to scholars working with foreign-language texts. It is composed primarily of resource listings and technical discussions of text processing and is not intended to be a work illustrating the hows or whys of text analysis.

Textbase for humanities applications: Wordcruncher

The compilation of concordances was one of the earliest applications of computers to research in the humanities. It is only fitting, therefore, that concordance programs be written for the increasing power of microcomputers and their peripherals. One of these, WordCruncher, uses the interactive immediacy of microcomputers in an impressive fashion. Called a "text indexing and retrieval" system, the package is aimed at manipulative very large bodies of text. Its developer, Electronic Text Corporation (ETC), claims the ability to accommodate texts great than 250 megabytes. Married to optical disk or CD-ROM' technology, then, this software will allow the user to interactively query concorded texts that would be difficult to work with even on a mainframe. In the meantime, widely available hard disk technology that can store large bodies of text should make WordCruncher very effective for research and teaching. The program is enthusiastically recommended to scholars requiring a concordance system as well as a more general text retrieval system. WordCruncher is a renamed and slightly updated version of the successful Brigham Young University Concordance Program (4.0). Not only has ETC rewritten the documentation and improved on some of the BYU Concordance package, it has also undertaken an impressive program to publish electronically a wide range of scholarly texts. The first

Concordance programs for literary analysis

Concordance programs for literary analysis

Using Key-Word-In-Context Concordance Programs for Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research

Using Key-Word-In-Context Concordance Programs for Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research

Concordance Programme for Digest Jurists

Concordance Programme for Digest Jurists

An experimental concordance program

The Columbia University School of Library Service has been gradually building a considerable group of experimental computer programs for information handling. A set of programs for concordance production has recently been added to this group. Since this program set is unusual in some respects, a description of the way in which it was built may be useful to others. The Columbia series of experimental computer programs was undertaken for a number of purposes. One of these purposes has been, of course, the utilitarian one of using the computer as a tool in the study of the subject analysis of information. Another has been as part of a research effort to distinguish clearly defined unit operations in information handling, analogous to unit operations in chemistry. This has resulted in a procedures library and in modular program groups. A third, and very important, reason for creating programs has been to provide students with the opportunity to produce various types of indexes, bibliographies, and catalogs. For this use, it is important to have programs with a capability for easily testing the effect of changing a number of production variables. Pursuit of these goals has resulted in programs which are comparatively uneconomic of computer time, though they are often highly economic as part of overall systems for particular purposes. The School did not, until recently, have a concordancing program set, although a faculty member and a research associate had had the good fortune to be involved in an advisory capacity with the production of an excellent concordance to Milton's English prose undertaken by Laurence Stern. Although none of his programs were used in the system described here, Dr. Stern's ideas and experiences contributed significantly to our work.'

Some uses of a grammatical concordance

The computer-generated concordance is probably the earliestdeveloped, least problematic, and most useful application of electronic data processing to literary texts. Not only do computers prepare concordances quickly and accurately, but they allow great flexibility of format and provide more information in their output than the traditional manual concordance. Freedom in formatting can be found in a "combinatorial" concordance program that produces contexts where words with identical roots cluster in groups of two or three.1 The possibility of increased output information is exemplified by the fact that in a concordance of dramatic works one can include the speaker of each line or word as well as the usual location.2 Such concordances can serve more than the customary needs of literary scholars. With the aid of a conventional concordance, one can trace the peculiar meaning given by an author to certain words; classify his vocabulary as nominal or verbal, concrete or abstract; or study his method of associating words in sets to create image patterns and themes. The words that yield this kind of information are usually nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The compiler of the concordance calls them "significant" words and lists every instance of them in an appropriate context; other words, the "most common" ones, are altogether omitted or listed partially. But these common words, which linguists call "structure" or "function" words (as opposed to "content" or "lexical" words), constitute the sole headings of a grammatical concordance. They consist of prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, quantifiers, whwords, the various kinds of pronouns, and the modal and tense auxiliary verbs.3 They mark syntactic relations and give formal

SST developments

ON both sides of the Atlantic, parallel aspects of the supersonic transport are in the news; economic and technical. While the Second Report of the Estimates Committee dealing with British transport aircraft castigated the Treasury for the laxity of its control over the financing of the Concord programme, across the water Mr Robert Six, President of Continental Airlines, was expressing the opinion that a compromise method of financing the development of the United States SST would have to be agreed if American industry was not to be forced out of the race due to the huge capital risk involved. While Boeing, Lockheed and North American Aviation were submitting their design proposals to the Federal Aviation Agency, British Aircraft Corporation and Sud‐Aviation were considering the improvement of the Concord's range and payload by increasing the thrust of Olympus 593 turbojets and possibly by modifying the aircraft's wing design.