Using a Concodancer

 

In this lab session, we will do the exercise on pages 68 and 69 of CALL, by Hardisty and Windeatt, using the free concordancer from Hong Kong,  (http://www.edict.com.hk/PUB/concapp/ ), and a text of Agatha Christie from the Gutenberg project (“Top 100 books downloaded this week”) http://www.gutenberg.net/browse/scores/top .

 

A. Install Concapp:

  1. Insert the disk and drag the file “concapp” to the desktop.
  2. Once on the desktop, double-click on the “concapp” folder to open it.
  3. Double Click on the SETUP icon—icon of a computer and a box of software--to install.  If you have Windows XP Service Pack 2, it won’t install, you’ll have to keep it in its folder and do steps 4 and 5.
  4. Right click on the purple striped icon that says Concapp application,
  5. And make a shortcut to the desktop.

B.  Put Agatha Christie and The Real Mother Goose on your desktop.

     1.  Drag the note-pad files, Secret Adversary, and The Real Mother Goose, to the desktop.

 

C.  Working with the concordancer, Concapp.

      1,  Open Concordancer

      2.  File>open>desktop>Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie

      3.  Go to “concordance” menu and down to “Search”

      4.  Type the word “may”(without apostrophe) in the “Search String” box.

      5.   Click “OK.”

      6.   You will now see all the phrases in the book where there is the word

            may.

  1. Right click on one of the colored words(may) to see the word in its    

complete sentence.

  1. Copy and paste the complete sentence into word.
  2. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for 4 more “may”s.
  3. Add a little introduction, such as “Project to find use of may in Agatha Christie.”  Save to Floppy and later paste into FrontPage if you are not online, or just copy and paste it into a new page in FrontPage when you are on line at www.angelfire.com/art3/englishviacomputer. 
  4. “Save as"(in Front Page) and make a link to this file, which might be called by yourname1.htm on your page. (See instructions below to make a link).

 

D.  Where can we get texts to put in our ConcApp?

      Newspapers on-line, of course, and project Gutenberg.  Whole books download quickly from project Gutenberg.  All you have to do is “unzip” the file and save it in notepad so that it can be opened in ConcApp.  Any text that you want to put in ConcApp, you must first save it as a Note Pad file so that ConcApp can open it.

 

E. There are also some scholarly research concordances on internet sites. 

1.  A concordance of Addison and Steele’s, The Spectator and The Tatler

http://tabula.rutgers.edu/spectator/project.html

On the student disk, I have provided several volumes of the Spectator and the Tatler that you can work with with ConcApp, which is faster than the internet site which actually has the original books as they were printed in the 18th century.

2.  The Chicago Homer:  A concordance of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in English and ancient Greek. (Put Chicago Homer in Google to find it)

3.  MICASE:  Michigan Concordance of Academic Spoken Englishhttp://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/m/micase/micase-idx?type=revise  

4.  Business Letter Concordancer  http://ysomeya.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

5.  British National Corpus On-line simple search: http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

6. More corpora can be found at the VEC Concordancer page:  http://users.otenet.gr/~damker/concord1.htm

 

F. On your student CD you have the text of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, and The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

Fitzgerald especially uses a lot of dialogue so it is good for looking at expressions to make a quiz with examples of Gerunds:

 

  1. In ConcApp, File>open The Beautiful and the Damned (7batd10)
  2. In ConcApp, Concordance>Search> (put in the suffix ing) radio button> suffix
  3. press OK
  4. left click on the gerund you want to see. Then right click to see where it appears in the text.
  5. Select, copy and paste the text with your gerund into Word or Notepad
  6. Do this for 5 examples and save in FrontPage as yourname2.htm and link to it from your home page.

 

G.  How to make a link to your project in your FrontPage home page.

     1.  Click on the white page in the upper left corner of the FrontPage window.  This opens a “new page”

     2.  In the Edit menu of Word, where you have written your research, go to “Select All” and then “Copy.  This put’s your research on the clipboard.

     3.  Now go to FrontPage, go to “Edit” and down to “paste.”  This puts the text of your research in a new Front Page.

     4.  Now go to File and Save As…  Give your project a name.  It should by “yourname” followed by the number 2, or 3, or 4.  For example HusseinAl-Omeri2   FrontPage will save it on the web and give it the proper ending--.htm.

     5.  Now go to your home page and make a link by writing a title and “selecting” it.  For Example “Link to Project 2:  Concodancing Gerunds”

     6.  While your title is selected (in black) go to “Insert” and down to “Insert Hyperlink”

     7.  In the window, find the file you want to link to that you just made (you will see it called, for example, “HusseinAl-Omeri2.htm” and select it.  Then just click OK and you will have made a link!  Don’t forget to “save” what you did before leaving FrontPage and the web.

 

H.  Here’s an interesting idea, but one you don’t necessarily have to do:  Make an English text book to teach the different tenses in English with sentences from The Spectator (British 18th century) and Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook (an American-lover of Britain).  According to The Cambridge History of English Literature (1943, MacMillan, New York, p249), Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook “served, and still serves, in France, in Germany, and in Italy as a model of English style and as a text-book from which students are taught their English.  In this latter role, it took, to a considerable extent, the place of The Spectator.”  Because of their beautiful style, Addison’s The Spectator and Irving’s The Sketchbook were used to teach English for a long time.