Concordancers

[Robin LaPasha]

On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, B.M. SHUTTLEWORTH wrote:

> From: B.M. SHUTTLEWORTH <RUSMS at ARTS-01.NOVELL.LEEDS.AC.UK>
>
> I was interested to hear your experience with  OUP's Micro-OCP.  It
> was certainly a package I considered buying when I was looking around
> recently.  Does it let you view text in Cyrillic?

I vaguely recall working with Micro-OCP at the CETH seminar but
even with the relevant notes I can't recall whether it could display
Cyrillic texts.  There are significant options to declare alphabets,
even with diacriticals.  Unlike TACT, the options seemed to work as
advertised. ;^)

The real problem I had with Micro-OCP was its lack of interactivity.
Basically you run a batch and find out the results.

>  I have been
> experimenting with MicroConcord, a concordancer produced by
> Birmingham University (Birmingham, UK, that is).  Using a standard
> KOI-8 screen and keyboard driver it's possible to do this, although
> it does mess up the appearance of the screen somewhat.  However, I'm
> generally delighted with the speed and general performance of this
> programme for basic concordancing, although am beginning to miss the
> option of producing frequency counts.
>
Three questions:
        1. What hardware and OS does it run on?
        2. how does one acquire this?  (Freebie on ftp?  Vast
amounts of money to Birmingham?)
        3. Can it do booleans AND, OR, and NOT?  (Especially AND,
and especially in connection to LISTS of words to be matched.)

> Does anyone else out there have experience using other concordancers
> with Russian text?

I've worked successfully with the older WordCruncher (PC/DOS)
and the Macintosh program Conc (a freebie by the SIL folks).
Conc unfortunately doesn't do booleans, only one-list searches--but
it's simple enough to turn your professors loose with. ;^)

I've received a beta of the new Windows WordCruncher, but I haven't
pursued using it much just now (it just appears to be more-better
of the same).

Both programs have the ability to move interactively from text
to list to search and back - which seems to be a very important
feature for literary analysis.  (Those of you looking for just
linguistic analysis will have to find your own hierarchies of
feature rankings.)

As I suggested above, U Toronto's TACT program does not handle
Cyrillic successfully (despite previous claims to the contrary).
(On the other hand, the TACT mailing list is fairly useful if
you're trying to keep up on the latest text crunchers.)

I recall that using the ISO Cyrillic charmapping in WordCruncher
made the screen borders turn into Cyrillic "G"s - so I switched
to alternativnyj and had no further problems.  (Perhaps KOI8 is
likewise stomping some DOS drawing-lines.)  We were able to use
Mac Cyrillic under Conc with no problems (as usual).

> Mark Shuttleworth
> Department of Modern Slavonic Studies
> University of Leeds
> Leeds LS2 9JT
> UK
> rusms at leeds.ac.uk
>

Robin LaPasha                    Soviet Literature Scanning Project
ruslan at acpub.duke.edu            Duke University