Getting Started with ConcApp 

ConcApp is a program for concordancing, listed by frequency and may be sorted by collocates to the right or left of the centred word. It can also find instances of word co-occurrence (called concgrams) which may be 2, 3, or 4-word instances of word co-occurrence. These cooncgrams can also be sorted by character position, i.e. the position in the line determined by character distance from the centred word.  .

This program also has a number of functions for text analysis, and these may be found listed under the Statistics Menu.

1. The corpus

The first thing to do is open a corpus file to interrogate. If this is an MS Word document (ie _____.DOC) it must be saved by MS Word as a "Plain Text" file (ie _____.TXT).  Use the "Save As" menu option from the "File" menu in Word.  Files which are have been tagged (such as files from the BNC or files saved in HTML or XML format) should have the tagging removed, and there is a function to remove tagging under the Tools Menu. Open the file you want to convert to text only, select TOOLS -> REMOVE TAGGING, and the file with tags removed will be opened in a new window.

2. Saving the file in MS Word

When you click the "Save" button after selecting "Plain Text" from the dropdown list, a File Conversion Dialog appears. You should check the "Insert Line Breaks" option and leave everything else to the default, then click OK.   

3. Merging several smaller files into one larger corpus file

If you have a number of small corpus files, they need to be merged into one larger file. The concgram automated list only works with a single corpus file which must be opened first.

To create the corpus file from the command prompt:

• Navigate to where the files are, for instance a directory named C:\CONCAPP\CORPUS.
• To get there, open the command prompt (START->RUN->CMD in Windows XP, in earlier versions of the operating system PROGRAMS->ACCESSORIES->MS DOS PROMPT), then type CD C:\ and press ENTER to change to the root directory of the C drive.
• Now type CD C:\CONCAPP\CORPUS and press ENTER.
• Type DIR to list all the files.
• When you have verified that you are in the correct directory, type COPY *.* MYCORPUS.TXT where MYCORPUS.TXT is the name of the file that you will create for your merged corpus.

4. To open ConcApp

Open ConcApp by clicking on the "START" button and going to "All Programs".  Select "ConcApp".

5. Open the corpus file

To open the corpus file click on the FILE >> OPEN menu option, and select from the file dialog.

6. Running a single word search

You can select the CONCORDANCE >> CONCORDANCE SEARCH menu option (see the Concordance Search Dialog for the search functions).  Enter the word you wish to search for into the Concordance Dialog Box - make sure you select the OPEN FILE option to search the corpus file which you have already opened.  Click OK and all the instances of the search word will be listed.

8. Run a co-occurring word search

Select the CONCORDANCE >> CONCGRAM SEARCH menu option.  Enter the words you wish to search for (2 - 4 words) and click OK.  The corpus file will be searched and the concgrams listed accordingly.  Different colours are used in the display to more easily identify the concgram members. 

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