The
Scholar’s Toolbox II: Concordances <beta release 0.9>
ACIM
Reference and Text Analysis Tools
©2007-2008
Miracles Pathway Fellowship
Full-Featured
Concordances Menu
The
full-featured Concordances require the installation of R.J.C. Watt’s Concordance
Software
(download
30 day free trial here)
Load HLC Seven Volume FULL Concordance
Load Urtext Seven Volume FULL Concordance
Note: With the Concordance
software installed, the above links enable the Concordance but not the Text
Viewer.
To obtain full
functionality for the Full Concordances, they must be loaded directly via
Windows Explorer, rather than here through the browser. After installing the Concordance™ software,
browse to the Concordances folder and double click on either of the Concordance
files (HLC7-full.txt.Concordance for the HLC
or whole7k-full.txtx.Concordance for the seven volume Urtext)
Many
kinds of textual scholarship need powerful text-analysis tools as much as a
carpenter needs a saw. The full-featured
Concordance is a tad pricey (~US$100) and is a rather complicated bit of
software that takes time to master.
That’s largely why the HTML
Concordances were produced. For more
casual use or simple word lookup, they are simple to use and very fast,
accessible and can be put on-line for a nominal cost.
While
the HTML Concordances are powerful and
simple tools for basic word searches, their features and flexibility are
necessarily limited by the limitations of the web browser used to search and
display them.
There
are additional universes of power and flexibility available with the Full
Concordance. A 30-day trial version of
the software can be downloaded free.
I’ll note that it took me much more than 30 days to really become
comfortable with the software so, if you want to give it a fair trial, begin by
reading the manual before you install it and start the 30 day clock ticking so
you will have a better idea of what you’re looking at when it finally appears
before your eyes!
This
is not a simple tool for beginners or dilettantes; it’s an enormously powerful
and flexible tool for serious scholarship.
A screenshot can only
give you an inkling of what it’s like to use the Full Concordance. In this shot, we’ve looked up and displayed
all instances of the word “world” and clicked on one, which is then highlighted
in the full text display window.
If we double-click on
any word in the full text, we jump to that word’s Concordance listing.
We can only show you one
of an almost infinite number of possible ways of displaying the results. Contexts can be made larger or smaller, or
organized by “sense units” or punctuation marks. We can restrict the display to specific words
or word families. We can display them by
proximity to other words, by frequency, or by many other criteria.
The power and
flexibility of this tool for serious textual analysis is enormous and light
years beyond what the simple HTML Concordances can offer through a web browser.
We include the databases
for the HLC and Urtext Concordances, but we can’t provide the “Concordance
Software” needed for the use of these databases. That has to be obtained from R.J.C.
Watt. A free 30 day trial version is
available. By all means try it
out!
Among the many things
you can do is generate printouts for any number of words you may care to
select. The printouts can be in text or
HTML or formatted printable files such as shown below.
Click
Here to see the full PDF file of this printout.
The context chosen for
this sample is five words before and after the search word. Many other context and display options are
available. On the right we see the
references, both the volume, chapter, section and paragraph reference and in
addition, the original manuscript page number reference. These are provided for citation, lookup, and
verification purposes.
We do not own or publish
the software needed to generate and display the Concordance data in this way,
it must be obtained from R.J.C.
Watt. We did however produce the
formatted, tagged text files which that software is shown using here.
Finally, if you are not
persuaded of the value of this item, read the manual
and tour Watt’s website!