Concordancers

[B.M. SHUTTLEWORTH]

On 15 February Robin LaPasha wrote:

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

To answer your three queries:-

1) MicroConcord runs on IBM PC or compatible, MS DOS 3 or higher;
minimum 220K RAM. It is a DOS programme.
2) It is a commercial programme available from:
        Oxford University Press
        Electronic Publishing
        Walton Street
        Oxford OX2 6DP
        UK
It retails for about stlg125.
3) It will do Boolean AND, but not OR or NOT (as far as I can tell).

NB This message is not meant to be a commercial - my motives are
entirely altruistic as I have nothing to do with OUP!

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