Corpus Analysis with Antconc

• Main Author: Heather Froehlich
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editorial Board of the Programming Historian 2015-06-01
• Series: The Programming Historian
• Subjects: corpus linguistics; antconc; corpus
• Online Access: http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/corpus-analysis-with-antconc

Corpus analysis is a form of text analysis which allows you to make comparisons between textual objects at a large scale (so-called ‘distant reading’). It allows us to see things that we don’t necessarily see when reading as humans. If you’ve got a collection of documents, you may want to find patterns of grammatical use, or frequently recurring phrases in your corpus. You also may want to find statistically likely and/or unlikely phrases for a particular author or kind of text, particular kinds of grammatical structures or a lot of examples of a particular concept across a large number of documents in context. Corpus analysis is especially useful for testing intuitions about texts and/or triangulating results from other digital methods.