The Programming Historian (Jun 2015)
Corpus Analysis with Antconc
Abstract
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.
