Using WordSmith Concordancer

Now let's open the WordSmith concordancer and play with a corpus!

1. Go back to the Desktop
2. Click [Start] -- [corpus] -- [WordSmith] and start WordSmith
3. Click [File] -- [Choose texts]
4. Go to Directory X:\wsmith\texts\flob\
5. Choose the file "flob_a.sgm" and press [OK]. This selects the press reportage category.
6. Go back to the menu and select [Tools] -- [Concord]
7. Click on the green button next to the red floppy icon
8. Click on [Change search-word] then type in any word you like and press [Go now!]
9. See if you can get concordance lines
10. Press the green button again and change search-words and run a few queries, writing down the number of occurrences each time. Some words you could try out are: she, he, European, can't, shall, my, someone, somebody, quite a, a lot, of course

What effect do these buttons have?    

If you have time, try the same search words as those above in another section (say K to R, ie fiction texts) of the FLOB corpus, noting how many times they occur. Do you notice much variation in frequency between the text categories? Do similar patterns occur in the LOB corpus, from 30 years earlier?

In the next two sessions, In Week 2 and 3, we will learn basic functions of WordSmith so that you can start exploring corpus resources more fully.