Brief Comments various Concordancers

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C o n c o r d a n c e r s

Brief Comments (in order of price)

Cobuild Direct

Accessible via the internet by any compuer loaded with Telnet

Their Comments

The following comments are from the Cobuild Web Site:
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/direct_info.html
What is CobuildDirect?
It is an on-line service for accessing a corpus of modern English language text, written and spoken. You may take out a six-month or full-year's subscription to CobuildDirect, and you will be allocated a user ID to login to one of our Unix servers and use our corpus retrieval software to get concordances, collocations, wordlists, etc. from a sub-component of the Bank of English. You may want to see some concordance data from the CobuildDirect corpus. If you aren't sure what we mean by "concordance data", here is a simple concordance demo which accesses the corpus. If you want to see what we mean by "collocations", try this collocations sampler too.
What data is available?
The 50 million word corpus is made up of texts from hundreds of sources, specially selected from the Bank of English. Ten million words of transcribed speech is now included, from recordings made across the range of real-life formal and informal speech situations. Radio broadcasts are also included. Books across a wide range of subject matters fiction and non-fiction, American and British were included to represent a broad spectrum of general English, avoiding highly specialised or technical publications. Newspapers and popular magazines are included, along with a mass of more ephemeral material such as personal letters, advertisements, leaflets and brochures.

My Comments

Without doubt this is the most powerful of the 10 concordancers featured here. There are 3 reasons. First, the size and breadth of the corpus means that discoveries made with this tool can be extrapolated to the English language as a whole. By 'breadth' I mean that it covers a large number of genres, including conversation. Secondly, the user can make complex searches, using a combination of query language and tags.
The third reason for this items' superiority is that it allows the user to discover various statistical information about a particular query. Namely, 't-score' and 'mutual information'.
It is also possible to save any searches one makes as a file on the Cobuild site. The user can then retrieve the file using FTP software.
So, in terms of 'power' this 'concordancer' stands head and shoulders above other concordancers. However, it's price tag is also well above other concordancers. So, unless you have deep pockets, or have a particularly generous employer this one may be out of your reach. However, it is worth knowing about since all other concordancers are measured against this. Ideally, at some time in the near future, all teachers and learners will have access to such a large and powerful tool. On, the other hand, it could be argued that if you have no intention of making in depth investigations into the English language, then this 'tool' is definitly not needed.
To some screen shots
Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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BNC online service or a cheaper CD ROM version

Their Comments

The following comments are from the BNC web site and links within it: http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/

About BNC Online: http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a one hundred million word corpus of British English, both spoken and written. The BNC Online service allows you to search this corpus in a variety of ways and download citations from the corpus, using a computer connected to the Internet. To take full advantage of this service, you must first download and install the SARA software system on your computer. SARA is a special purpose browser and concordancer generator, designed specifically for use with the BNC. It is free of charge to all BNC licensees. At present, however, it is only available for Microsoft Windows computers.

About the BNC Sampler: http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/getting/sampler.html

If you don't happen to have enough disk space for the entire BNC and you don't have easy access to the Internet, then the BNC Sampler may be just what you are looking for. The Sampler corpus contains one million words of spoken text and one million words of written text. In selecting from the BNC, we tried to preserve the variety of text-types represented, so the Sampler includes in its 184 texts many different genres of writing and modes of speech. Full bibliography and documentation is included on the CD, of course. The Sampler corpus is in the same SGML format as the original BNC.

My Comments

Still working on this one

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Word Smith Tools version 3.0

For any computer with Windows 3.1 or above (also works on SoftWindows 3.1 and 95)

Their Comments

The following comments are from pages 7 and 8 of the WordSmith 3.0 manual (written by Mike Scott), which comes with the software. You can download the software from:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928/
Introduction to WordSmith Tools
WordSmith Tools is an integrated suite of programs for looking at how words behave in texts. You will be able to use tools to find out how words are used in your own texts, or those of others. The Wordlist tool lets you see a list of all the words or word-clusters in a text, set out in alphabetical or frequency order. The concordancer, Concord, gives you a chance to see any word or phrase in context ― so that you can see what sort of company it keeps. With KeyWords you can find the key words in a text.
The tools are used by Oxford University Press for their own lexicographic work in preparing dictionaries, by language teachers and students, and by researchers investigating language patterns in lots of different languages in many countries world-wide.

My Comments

If you wish to make an in depth analysis of large amounts of text that you have acquired this would be the concordancer to choose. Not only can this software produce concordances of single words, it can also do the same for 'word clusters'. Furthermore, it can produce wordlists, and identify 'key words'. Thus unlike the above two concordancers, the user has to provide the corpora.
If all you need is a tool just to make concordances and word lists, this will probably be unnecessarily complex. However, the demo version s free to download, and is fully functional, except that the output is limited to the first 20 of everything (e.g. the first 20 concordances of any word).
To some screen shots
Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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For any computer with Windows 95 or above (also works on SoftWindows 95)

Their Comments

The following comments are from the Concordance web site (key features and abilities) : http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/

Concordance lets you:
Make full concordances to texts of any size, limited only by available disk space and memory
Make fast concordances, picking your selection of words from text
Make Web Concordances: turn your concordance into linked HTML files, ready for publishing on the Web, with a single click. See the original Web Concordances for examples.
View a full wordlist, a concordance, and your original text simultaneously
Browse through the original text and click on any word to see every occurrence of that word in its context
Edit and re-arrange a wordlist by drag and drop
User-definable reference system: identifies which section of a text each citation comes from
User-definable contexts: words are shown in contexts which you can vary by length or sense-unit
Search, select, and sort words in very flexible ways

http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/

My Comments

Developed by R. J. C. Watt, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Dundee.

This piece of software is similar to MonoConc Pro in terms of its functions. Although, unlike MonoConc Pro it can only work on one text file at any one time.

The most useful aspect of this software is its ability to generate 'web concordances'. This means that the user can create a concordance of an enture text and then, using Concordane, convert the results to html files. In this form they can be accessed by anyone with a internet browser. If the html files are saved to a disk (as opposed to being uploaded to a server), it is not even neccessary to have access to the internet. This function makes this product very useful for teachers that wish their students to have access to concordances without having to teach them how to use concordancing software.

examples of web concordances at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/wics.htm

To some screen shots

Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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Collins Cobuild English Collocations on CD-ROM

For any computer with Windows 3.1 or above (also works on SoftWindows 3.1 and 95)

Their Comments

The following comments are from the Cobuild Web Site:
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/collscd.html
An amazingly simple but powerful language resource
On this CD-ROM you have access at the click of a button to 140,000 English collocations (frequent word combinations) and 2,600,000 real examples of how these word combinations are used. The collocations and the real examples are extracted from a corpus of 200 million words: the Bank of English. Here you will discover idioms, phrasal verbs, compounds, fixed phrases and grammatical patterns fully supported with evidence from authentic speech and writing.
Really easy interface: get straight to the real data
Choose a node word from the 10,000 included on the CD-ROM. These are the core vocabulary items of English. Once you've selected a word just click to bring up on screen a list of the most significant collocates. Up to twenty collocates are shown, in decreasing frequency order. Choose one of the collocates and click again to see a screen of examples of this collocation from real texts, spoken as well as written.

My Comments

This CD-ROM is a scaled down version of the CobuildDirect service, and as such is definitely good value for money. Given that the corpus for this CD-ROM has been taken from the Bank of English, one would have thought that a far more powerful concordancer could have been created. Unlike CobuildDirect, it is not possible to carry out complex searches. Only single words can be entered and searched for. The only statistical information that it provides is the absolute frequency of headwords. I believe that it has been deliberately 'dumbed' down so as not to reduce potential demand for it's progenitor, CobuildDirect. However to be fair, the fact that it is simple means that one can be producing concordances and retrieving collocations within a matter of minutes.
Its ease of use also makes this tool a possibility if you are looking for a concordancer that students could use.
To some screen shots

Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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Mono Conc

Their Comments

The following comments are from the Athelstan web site, which can be found at: http://www.athel.com/
Mono Conc Pro: http://www.athel.com/mono.html#monopro
MonoConc Pro is a new addition to the MonoConc family of text analysis software. It is designed for linguists and other researchers who wish to use a computer to extract patterns from both untagged texts and texts annotated with mark-up or tags. An intuitive interface makes MonoConc Pro very easy to use, yet the program offers a variety of options that make it powerful enough for large and complex text searches.
Mono Conc 1.5:
http://www.athel.com/mono.html#mono
MonoConc (Windows version) is a concordance program for researchers, language teachers and language students (and anyone who works with texts). This Windows concordancer is very easy to use---it is possible to initiate concordance searches for words and phrases immediately. Yet, those who are experienced concordance users will find that MonoConc offers functionality and flexibility through a variety of configurable options. The program is shipped with both 16-bit and 32-bit versions on the disk.

My Comments

The original MonoConc concordancer was Macintosh only (see below). Now Athelstan makes two window's versions. Both are much faster than the Mac version but are not free. Demos can be downloaded from the Athelstan site:
http://www.athel.com/mono.html

To some screen shots (MonoConc Pro)

Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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Ultra Find 2.5.3

For any computer with Power PC Macintosh running system 7.x.x or 8.x.x (and 9 seems to be OK)

Their Comments

The following comments are from the UltraDesign Web Site:
http://www.ultradesign.com
UltraFind solves the biggest problem you have today: how to quickly find something in the overwhelming volume of information on your hard disks, on your network, or even worldwide on the Internet. Powerful and full-featured, UltraFind treats your Mac or network as an information-rich file and text searchable database.
Its extremely fast Text Search shows words in context (in their original sentence), can search in both live or preindexed modes, and even includes a built-in Thesaurus, allowing you to find documents related to a particular topic you are looking for, on your hard disks, in text indexes, and on the World Wide Web and in Newsgroups.

My Comments

You will have noticed from the comments to the left that UltraFind was not built to be a concordancer. It is first and foremost a search tool for the Macintosh. However, the words, 'extremely fast text search shows words in context (in their original sentence),' alerts one to the fact this search tool can double as a concordancer.
When making a search, the user specifies where the search is to be made (the whole hard disk, or just a single folder or file), and enters a word or phrase to be searched for. In a matter of seconds the results are displayed showing the word or phrase in their original sentence. So, although the documentation that comes with the software does not mention the word 'concordance', to all intents and purposes it can be used a concordancer.
Incidentally, another use of this tool is to find articles about a certain topic to be dealt with in class. One can search in files that one has on ones hard disk (such as the email version of the Guardian Weekly), or the world wide web. It is also possible to search for kanji (Japanese characters); very useful for learners and teachers of Japanese.
To some screen shots
Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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Mono Conc for the Macintosh

Their Comments

The following comments are from page 1 of the MonoConc manual (written by Michael Barlow), a copy of which could be found at:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html#Text
MonoConc (Mac version) is a simple program that allows teachers and students to carry out research into the lexical, syntactic, and semantic patterns of a language using a corpus (a computer-based text or collection of texts). To explore the contents of a corpus, the user initiates a search for a specified morpheme, word, or phrase (a search term) and the program then finds and displays all the instances of the search term in the texts. The search term is displayed in the centre of a window, along with a context consisting of a set number of preceding and following characters.

My Comments

It seemed for a while that it was no longer possible to download this software. However, I visited Michael Barlow's web site, and found that it was possible to download 'paraconc', software that allowas you to view two versions of the same text (e.g. English and French). By slightly changing the download address I discovered that it is still possible to download this freeware: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/MonoConc.hqx (note! as soon as you click on this link the download will begin)

If you are a Macintosh user and just want something simple to work on small texts, this software would be fine. However, you will soon become frustrated with it if you want to analyse larger texts. At the very least, it is a free and easy way to familiarise yourself (or your students) with concordancing software.

To some screen shots

Details (price, system requirements etc.)

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Conc 1.8

For any just about any Macintosh computer

Their Comments

The following comments are from page 2 of the Conc 1.80 manual (written by John Thomson), which comes with the software. You can download the software from:
http://www.sil.org/computing/conc/conc.html
Conc is a program designed to facilitate the intensive study of a text by producing a list of all the words occurring in it, with a short section of the context preceding and following each occurrence of a word. In many fields of study such a list is called a concordance. It is also similar to a keyword-in-context (KWIC) index, except that the index does not have to be restricted to particular words.
Conc can also produce a more conventional index, consisting of a list of the (distinct) words in a document, each with a list of the places where it occurs. It can also do some simple statistical studies of a text, such as counting the number of occurrences of words that match a 'pattern'.
Conc displays the original text in one window and the concordance of the text in another window. If requested, the index is displayed in a third window. By clicking a particular word in the concordance you can locate that word in the main text, thus seeing a larger context than is possible in the concordance, which is limited to one line per word. It is also possible to click in the index and thus locate the corresponding group of lines in the concordance (and the first occurrence in the text), or to click a word in the text and locate the corresponding position in the other windows.

My Comments

This is freeware, and it works well. What other reasons do you need to download this concordancer? This concordancer was originally designed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to assist in their translations. Hence it's ability to handle annotated texts (interlinear texts) in which, for example, not only the standard text is shown, but also morpheme breaks and glosses are also shown. These functions can be ignored if all you want is the ability to produce concordances and indexes. Unlike the other 5 concordancers, Conc automatically produces a concordance of the entire selected text. All this information, and the text, and then the word index have to fit into memory. Thus the bigger the text you want to work with the more memory you' ll need. With the memory set at 10MB on my Performa, Conc was able to open a 4.4 MB folder of text (about 760,000 words) and produce concordances of all the words in this text, and then produce a word index.
If you plan to use this software on system 8.5 or above, don' t forget to install the Type 12 Eliminator extension. You have to download this separately from the SIL web site.
To some screen shots
Details (price, system requirements etc.)

The Bottom Line

All of these nine concordancers have their strengths. Some of them are far more than just concordances, and so may be more than you really need. Essentially, the higher the cost, the more they will do for you. If you are wondering which one to choose, I would suggest that, if possible, you try all of them. Admittedly, with the two Cobuild products, there are no 'demos'. However, if you visit the Cobuild site, it is possible to get an idea of what these two products can do. The other seven concordancers can be downloaded. In the case of WordSmith and MonoConc (for windows), they are demo versions. UltraFind, when downloaded, is a fully operational, but with a limited life of a month, after which the user must register and pay. Conc is freeware, and so is definitely worth a try.
One factor that will influence your decision is the type of computer that you have. If you have a Power PC Macintosh and SoftWindows, you will be able to use all of the above concordancers. If you are contemplating buying SoftWindows 95, beware that it does not run well on machines that have a processor of less than 180 MHz (e.g. all Performas). If you are in this position try getting hold of SoftWindows 3.1. This will be able to run WordSmith 3.0, and the MonoConc concordancer (note, the MonoConc pro version needs windows 95).
If you are a windows 95 user or above, you will be able to run all the concordancers, except UltraFind and Conc 1.80.
So my advice is to try all of 'concordancers' that you can get your hands on, and that will run on your machine. Probably, more problematic than getting hold of and learning to use a concordancer, is the problem of finding a corpus. The concordancer is a tool. The quality of material that you apply the tool to ― the corpus ― and how you use the material ― your imagination ― is what will make the difference.

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This page: http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/comments.html

back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers C o n c o r d a n c e r s Brief Comments (in order of price)
Cobuild Direct Accessible via the internet by any compuer loaded with Telnet
Their Comments The following comments are from the Cobuild Web Site: http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/direct_info.html What is CobuildDirect? It is an on-line service for accessing a corpus of modern English language text, written and spoken. You may take out a six-month or full-year's subscription to CobuildDirect, and you will be allocated a user ID to login to one of our Unix servers and use our corpus retrieval software to get concordances, collocations, wordlists, etc. from a sub-component of the Bank of English. You may want to see some concordance data from the CobuildDirect corpus. If you aren't sure what we mean by "concordance data", here is a simple concordance demo which accesses the corpus. If you want to see what we mean by "collocations", try this collocations sampler too. What data is available? The 50 million word corpus is made up of texts from hundreds of sources, specially selected from the Bank of English. Ten million words of transcribed speech is now included, from recordings made across the range of real-life formal and informal speech situations. Radio broadcasts are also included. Books across a wide range of subject matters fiction and non-fiction, American and British were included to represent a broad spectrum of general English, avoiding highly specialised or technical publications. Newspapers and popular magazines are included, along with a mass of more ephemeral material such as personal letters, advertisements, leaflets and brochures.	My Comments Without doubt this is the most powerful of the 10 concordancers featured here. There are 3 reasons. First, the size and breadth of the corpus means that discoveries made with this tool can be extrapolated to the English language as a whole. By 'breadth' I mean that it covers a large number of genres, including conversation. Secondly, the user can make complex searches, using a combination of query language and tags. The third reason for this items' superiority is that it allows the user to discover various statistical information about a particular query. Namely, 't-score' and 'mutual information'. It is also possible to save any searches one makes as a file on the Cobuild site. The user can then retrieve the file using FTP software. So, in terms of 'power' this 'concordancer' stands head and shoulders above other concordancers. However, it's price tag is also well above other concordancers. So, unless you have deep pockets, or have a particularly generous employer this one may be out of your reach. However, it is worth knowing about since all other concordancers are measured against this. Ideally, at some time in the near future, all teachers and learners will have access to such a large and powerful tool. On, the other hand, it could be argued that if you have no intention of making in depth investigations into the English language, then this 'tool' is definitly not needed. To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers BNC online service or a cheaper CD ROM version
Their Comments The following comments are from the BNC web site and links within it: http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/ About BNC Online: http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ The British National Corpus (BNC) is a one hundred million word corpus of British English, both spoken and written. The BNC Online service allows you to search this corpus in a variety of ways and download citations from the corpus, using a computer connected to the Internet. To take full advantage of this service, you must first download and install the SARA software system on your computer. SARA is a special purpose browser and concordancer generator, designed specifically for use with the BNC. It is free of charge to all BNC licensees. At present, however, it is only available for Microsoft Windows computers. About the BNC Sampler: http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/getting/sampler.html If you don't happen to have enough disk space for the entire BNC and you don't have easy access to the Internet, then the BNC Sampler may be just what you are looking for. The Sampler corpus contains one million words of spoken text and one million words of written text. In selecting from the BNC, we tried to preserve the variety of text-types represented, so the Sampler includes in its 184 texts many different genres of writing and modes of speech. Full bibliography and documentation is included on the CD, of course. The Sampler corpus is in the same SGML format as the original BNC.	My Comments Still working on this one
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Word Smith Tools version 3.0 For any computer with Windows 3.1 or above (also works on SoftWindows 3.1 and 95)
Their Comments The following comments are from pages 7 and 8 of the WordSmith 3.0 manual (written by Mike Scott), which comes with the software. You can download the software from: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928/ Introduction to WordSmith Tools WordSmith Tools is an integrated suite of programs for looking at how words behave in texts. You will be able to use tools to find out how words are used in your own texts, or those of others. The Wordlist tool lets you see a list of all the words or word-clusters in a text, set out in alphabetical or frequency order. The concordancer, Concord, gives you a chance to see any word or phrase in context ― so that you can see what sort of company it keeps. With KeyWords you can find the key words in a text. The tools are used by Oxford University Press for their own lexicographic work in preparing dictionaries, by language teachers and students, and by researchers investigating language patterns in lots of different languages in many countries world-wide.	My Comments If you wish to make an in depth analysis of large amounts of text that you have acquired this would be the concordancer to choose. Not only can this software produce concordances of single words, it can also do the same for 'word clusters'. Furthermore, it can produce wordlists, and identify 'key words'. Thus unlike the above two concordancers, the user has to provide the corpora. If all you need is a tool just to make concordances and word lists, this will probably be unnecessarily complex. However, the demo version s free to download, and is fully functional, except that the output is limited to the first 20 of everything (e.g. the first 20 concordances of any word). To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers For any computer with Windows 95 or above (also works on SoftWindows 95)
Their Comments The following comments are from the Concordance web site (key features and abilities) : http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/ Concordance lets you: Make full concordances to texts of any size, limited only by available disk space and memory Make fast concordances, picking your selection of words from text Make Web Concordances: turn your concordance into linked HTML files, ready for publishing on the Web, with a single click. See the original Web Concordances for examples. View a full wordlist, a concordance, and your original text simultaneously Browse through the original text and click on any word to see every occurrence of that word in its context Edit and re-arrange a wordlist by drag and drop User-definable reference system: identifies which section of a text each citation comes from User-definable contexts: words are shown in contexts which you can vary by length or sense-unit Search, select, and sort words in very flexible ways http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/	My Comments Developed by R. J. C. Watt, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Dundee. This piece of software is similar to MonoConc Pro in terms of its functions. Although, unlike MonoConc Pro it can only work on one text file at any one time. The most useful aspect of this software is its ability to generate 'web concordances'. This means that the user can create a concordance of an enture text and then, using Concordane, convert the results to html files. In this form they can be accessed by anyone with a internet browser. If the html files are saved to a disk (as opposed to being uploaded to a server), it is not even neccessary to have access to the internet. This function makes this product very useful for teachers that wish their students to have access to concordances without having to teach them how to use concordancing software. examples of web concordances at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/wics.htm To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Collins Cobuild English Collocations on CD-ROM For any computer with Windows 3.1 or above (also works on SoftWindows 3.1 and 95)
Their Comments The following comments are from the Cobuild Web Site: http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/collscd.html An amazingly simple but powerful language resource On this CD-ROM you have access at the click of a button to 140,000 English collocations (frequent word combinations) and 2,600,000 real examples of how these word combinations are used. The collocations and the real examples are extracted from a corpus of 200 million words: the Bank of English. Here you will discover idioms, phrasal verbs, compounds, fixed phrases and grammatical patterns fully supported with evidence from authentic speech and writing. Really easy interface: get straight to the real data Choose a node word from the 10,000 included on the CD-ROM. These are the core vocabulary items of English. Once you've selected a word just click to bring up on screen a list of the most significant collocates. Up to twenty collocates are shown, in decreasing frequency order. Choose one of the collocates and click again to see a screen of examples of this collocation from real texts, spoken as well as written.	My Comments This CD-ROM is a scaled down version of the CobuildDirect service, and as such is definitely good value for money. Given that the corpus for this CD-ROM has been taken from the Bank of English, one would have thought that a far more powerful concordancer could have been created. Unlike CobuildDirect, it is not possible to carry out complex searches. Only single words can be entered and searched for. The only statistical information that it provides is the absolute frequency of headwords. I believe that it has been deliberately 'dumbed' down so as not to reduce potential demand for it's progenitor, CobuildDirect. However to be fair, the fact that it is simple means that one can be producing concordances and retrieving collocations within a matter of minutes. Its ease of use also makes this tool a possibility if you are looking for a concordancer that students could use. To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Mono Conc
Their Comments The following comments are from the Athelstan web site, which can be found at: http://www.athel.com/ Mono Conc Pro: http://www.athel.com/mono.html#monopro MonoConc Pro is a new addition to the MonoConc family of text analysis software. It is designed for linguists and other researchers who wish to use a computer to extract patterns from both untagged texts and texts annotated with mark-up or tags. An intuitive interface makes MonoConc Pro very easy to use, yet the program offers a variety of options that make it powerful enough for large and complex text searches. Mono Conc 1.5: http://www.athel.com/mono.html#mono MonoConc (Windows version) is a concordance program for researchers, language teachers and language students (and anyone who works with texts). This Windows concordancer is very easy to use---it is possible to initiate concordance searches for words and phrases immediately. Yet, those who are experienced concordance users will find that MonoConc offers functionality and flexibility through a variety of configurable options. The program is shipped with both 16-bit and 32-bit versions on the disk.	My Comments The original MonoConc concordancer was Macintosh only (see below). Now Athelstan makes two window's versions. Both are much faster than the Mac version but are not free. Demos can be downloaded from the Athelstan site: http://www.athel.com/mono.html To some screen shots (MonoConc Pro) Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Ultra Find 2.5.3 For any computer with Power PC Macintosh running system 7.x.x or 8.x.x (and 9 seems to be OK)
Their Comments The following comments are from the UltraDesign Web Site: http://www.ultradesign.com UltraFind solves the biggest problem you have today: how to quickly find something in the overwhelming volume of information on your hard disks, on your network, or even worldwide on the Internet. Powerful and full-featured, UltraFind treats your Mac or network as an information-rich file and text searchable database. Its extremely fast Text Search shows words in context (in their original sentence), can search in both live or preindexed modes, and even includes a built-in Thesaurus, allowing you to find documents related to a particular topic you are looking for, on your hard disks, in text indexes, and on the World Wide Web and in Newsgroups.	My Comments You will have noticed from the comments to the left that UltraFind was not built to be a concordancer. It is first and foremost a search tool for the Macintosh. However, the words, 'extremely fast text search shows words in context (in their original sentence),' alerts one to the fact this search tool can double as a concordancer. When making a search, the user specifies where the search is to be made (the whole hard disk, or just a single folder or file), and enters a word or phrase to be searched for. In a matter of seconds the results are displayed showing the word or phrase in their original sentence. So, although the documentation that comes with the software does not mention the word 'concordance', to all intents and purposes it can be used a concordancer. Incidentally, another use of this tool is to find articles about a certain topic to be dealt with in class. One can search in files that one has on ones hard disk (such as the email version of the Guardian Weekly), or the world wide web. It is also possible to search for kanji (Japanese characters); very useful for learners and teachers of Japanese. To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Mono Conc for the Macintosh
Their Comments The following comments are from page 1 of the MonoConc manual (written by Michael Barlow), a copy of which could be found at: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html#Text MonoConc (Mac version) is a simple program that allows teachers and students to carry out research into the lexical, syntactic, and semantic patterns of a language using a corpus (a computer-based text or collection of texts). To explore the contents of a corpus, the user initiates a search for a specified morpheme, word, or phrase (a search term) and the program then finds and displays all the instances of the search term in the texts. The search term is displayed in the centre of a window, along with a context consisting of a set number of preceding and following characters.	My Comments It seemed for a while that it was no longer possible to download this software. However, I visited Michael Barlow's web site, and found that it was possible to download 'paraconc', software that allowas you to view two versions of the same text (e.g. English and French). By slightly changing the download address I discovered that it is still possible to download this freeware: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/MonoConc.hqx (note! as soon as you click on this link the download will begin) If you are a Macintosh user and just want something simple to work on small texts, this software would be fine. However, you will soon become frustrated with it if you want to analyse larger texts. At the very least, it is a free and easy way to familiarise yourself (or your students) with concordancing software. To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
back to the concordancing index \| links to the makers of the concordancers \| details of the concordancers Conc 1.8 For any just about any Macintosh computer
Their Comments The following comments are from page 2 of the Conc 1.80 manual (written by John Thomson), which comes with the software. You can download the software from: http://www.sil.org/computing/conc/conc.html Conc is a program designed to facilitate the intensive study of a text by producing a list of all the words occurring in it, with a short section of the context preceding and following each occurrence of a word. In many fields of study such a list is called a concordance. It is also similar to a keyword-in-context (KWIC) index, except that the index does not have to be restricted to particular words. Conc can also produce a more conventional index, consisting of a list of the (distinct) words in a document, each with a list of the places where it occurs. It can also do some simple statistical studies of a text, such as counting the number of occurrences of words that match a 'pattern'. Conc displays the original text in one window and the concordance of the text in another window. If requested, the index is displayed in a third window. By clicking a particular word in the concordance you can locate that word in the main text, thus seeing a larger context than is possible in the concordance, which is limited to one line per word. It is also possible to click in the index and thus locate the corresponding group of lines in the concordance (and the first occurrence in the text), or to click a word in the text and locate the corresponding position in the other windows.	My Comments This is freeware, and it works well. What other reasons do you need to download this concordancer? This concordancer was originally designed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to assist in their translations. Hence it's ability to handle annotated texts (interlinear texts) in which, for example, not only the standard text is shown, but also morpheme breaks and glosses are also shown. These functions can be ignored if all you want is the ability to produce concordances and indexes. Unlike the other 5 concordancers, Conc automatically produces a concordance of the entire selected text. All this information, and the text, and then the word index have to fit into memory. Thus the bigger the text you want to work with the more memory you' ll need. With the memory set at 10MB on my Performa, Conc was able to open a 4.4 MB folder of text (about 760,000 words) and produce concordances of all the words in this text, and then produce a word index. If you plan to use this software on system 8.5 or above, don' t forget to install the Type 12 Eliminator extension. You have to download this separately from the SIL web site. To some screen shots Details (price, system requirements etc.)
The Bottom Line
All of these nine concordancers have their strengths. Some of them are far more than just concordances, and so may be more than you really need. Essentially, the higher the cost, the more they will do for you. If you are wondering which one to choose, I would suggest that, if possible, you try all of them. Admittedly, with the two Cobuild products, there are no 'demos'. However, if you visit the Cobuild site, it is possible to get an idea of what these two products can do. The other seven concordancers can be downloaded. In the case of WordSmith and MonoConc (for windows), they are demo versions. UltraFind, when downloaded, is a fully operational, but with a limited life of a month, after which the user must register and pay. Conc is freeware, and so is definitely worth a try. One factor that will influence your decision is the type of computer that you have. If you have a Power PC Macintosh and SoftWindows, you will be able to use all of the above concordancers. If you are contemplating buying SoftWindows 95, beware that it does not run well on machines that have a processor of less than 180 MHz (e.g. all Performas). If you are in this position try getting hold of SoftWindows 3.1. This will be able to run WordSmith 3.0, and the MonoConc concordancer (note, the MonoConc pro version needs windows 95). If you are a windows 95 user or above, you will be able to run all the concordancers, except UltraFind and Conc 1.80. So my advice is to try all of 'concordancers' that you can get your hands on, and that will run on your machine. Probably, more problematic than getting hold of and learning to use a concordancer, is the problem of finding a corpus. The concordancer is a tool. The quality of material that you apply the tool to ― the corpus ― and how you use the material ― your imagination ― is what will make the difference.