Concordances are a very useful tool for anyone who works with textual data. Concordancing tools (also referred to as Keyword in Context or KWIC tools) provide us with a listing of all occurrences of a word in a text along with some surrounding context. A concordance is therefore an excellent starting point to explore how a word is used in a text. Most KWIC tools also have the capability to sort results according to the context of the instances, by preceding words or following words, or a combination of the two, and these capabilities allow us to extract more specific information from concordances.

In this workshop, participants:

• were introduced to tools for building concordances
• were shown examples of how simple and complex concordances can be used to answer questions
• had the chance to explore text using concordances, either from data they brought or from data that was provided.

Leader: Simon Musgrave