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This tutorial will look at some of the ways to enhance your concordance searches and views for Antconc.

So you have made concordance lines. But you cannot see any “pattern” in the lines. What you need to do is sort them.

Sort

Under the Search Term box are some controls labeled “KWIC sort”. KWIC stands for “Key Word In Context”. The way the search word is centred and shown in a concordance is known as KWIC. It allows you to find word patterns more easily. Returning now to the KWIC sort feature, to the right of the checked first digit box is an up and down arrow. Click the up arrow once. The “0” in the digit box should now read “1R”. This means “one word to the right”. Click the “Sort” button. The words on the right of the KWIC word should now be red (default setting) and sorted in alphabetical order. In general, sorting more than three or four to the left or right of the search term is unnecessary since the further away the word is the less it is connected to the word in question.

Another feature in Antconc is that it allows to up to three levels of sorting. Play with this feature and see what kind of patterns emerge.

Concordance Plot
Concordance lines do not show us where they are in the corpus. In order to see this we need to look at the Concordance plot. Click on the “Concordance Plot” tab. If you have multiple files open you should see several bar code-like graphics. The lines in the bars represent where the occurrence of the search term is in each particular file. You can click on the lines in the bar to see the word in the original file (or File View).

Congratulations! You now can sort your concordance lines and see where they are in your files.

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