I have written this column for almost 20 years. This amounts to more than a thousand columns. Or if you prefer word count, more than half a million words.
I have each column saved as a separate file on my computer. But I also have one massive file with all the columns in it. Each week when I write a new column, I copy the text and add it to the bottom of this giant file.
I told you that so I could tell you this.
There is a free program called AntConc. It was written by a brilliant and generous fellow named Laurence Anthony, who is a professor on the faculty of Waseda University, Japan. AntConc works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, but not on phones. It works with text files, Word docs, PDFs, HTMLs and other formats.
The Conc part of the name stands for concordance. If you load one or more files into AntConc, it will make a list of all the words in the files, from the words used most often down to those used least.
But that is not the best part. It will also create a concordance of the words. You can search for a particular word and AntConc will show you all the places the word appears in your file or files. The style of concordance it creates is call KWIC, which stands for Key Word In Context.
The sought-for word will appear in a blue column in the middle of the results window. To the left and right will be neighboring words in the sentences that contain the key word. So you can see the key word in context.
Let’s say I search my columns for the word leopard. My results include this line:
“hartebeest, gazelle, hippopotamus, leopard, lion, eland, impala, giraffe, ostrich, vulture, and waterbuck . . .”
I can tell this is not the use of leopard I’m looking for.
Further down the results page, I see this:
“The frog most often seen in movies is the leopard frog. He’s handsome, spotted, energetic, and an excellent leaper.”
That’s the one I want, so I click on it and bam, AntConc takes me to that column.
This is handy because often I can’t remember if I thought of writing about a certain subject or if I actually wrote about it.
If you were writing a book report and could get the text of the book into AntConc, you could say things like, “The book is supposed to be about oak trees, but the author mentions elm trees twice as often as she does oaks.”
Or if you are writing a book and wonder how many times you used the word lost or pasta or shirttail. Or you changed a character’s name from Shirley to Brenda and you want to make sure there are no Shirleys sill lurking in the manuscript.
AntConc is much more powerful than I have just described. It is a corpus analysis toolkit for concordance and text analysis. To get a copy or to learn more, search the Internet for AntConc or for Laurence Anthony.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
