[Corpora-List] Looking at concordances

[Khurshid Ahmad]

Dear Martin
What do people do when ...? Sounds like a first rate project in cognition.
 Concordances are designed to fix your gaze (on the concorded word) and
the purpose of a concordance,as I understood from leading corpora wallahs,
is to establish a statistical pattern.

The concordances were invented in hermeneutics for the study of texts (of
divine origin) and another route is  Kabbalah. The late John Sinclair
always used to have a concordance listing as a punch line; the punch lines
appear in his writings as well.

There are a number of studies in translation and terminology studies that
deal with what people do with text and terminology tools; I can send you a
list if you wish.

Best wishes



> Is anyone aware of any research that has been done on how people look at
> concordances? I'm interested in experimental research on what users do
> when they look at concordance lines, from the point of view of their
> behaviour, gaze, and any psychological aspects. References to usability
> studies on concordancer software would be also be interesting.
>
> I'm thinking of putting together a proposal for an investigation in
> collaboration with psychologists and ethnographers into what we do when
> we look at concordances, and so I need to be aware of existing work.
>
> I'll be happy to post a summary of results to the list.
>
> --
> Martin Wynne
> Head of the Oxford Text Archive and
> AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics
>
> Oxford University Computing Services
> 13 Banbury Road
> Oxford
> UK - OX2 6NN
> Tel: +44 1865 283299
> Fax: +44 1865 273275
> martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk
>
>
>


Khurshid Ahmad

Professor of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College,
DUBLIN-2
IRELAND
Phone 00 353 1 896 8429

Web Page: http://people.tcd.ie/kahmad