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LETRS has available the following text analysis applications for demonstration and experimental use: WordCruncher (WC), Textual Analysis Computing Tools (TACT), Oxford Concordance Program for Microcomputers (Micro -OCP), and Conc (a concordance generator). WC, TACT, and Micro-OCP are DOS applications; Conc is designed for the Macintosh.
These programs share a common purpose: facilitating retrieval and analysis of text by concordancing, coding, or statistical computing. Nevertheless, their text retrieval and analysis capacities and their operating styles are significantly different. Each program has its distinctive features.
You can download these programs as well as other text analysis shareware and free demos from the Text Analysis Applications section of our list of Related Internet Resources. You can get additional information on our text analysis programs from the Overview of Textual Analysis Software page.
For personalized help, contact a consultant at LETRS in the Main Library.
WordCruncher is sophisticated, powerful, and convenient to use. It includes two separate programs: WCIndex creates textbases, while WCView retrieves and analyzes them in various ways. By pressing function keys, one can conduct word and phrase searches, create concordances according to a set of user-defined parameters, make reference lists, or create indices. The WordCruncher manual is well written, containing many useful examples and exercises. In addition to being available as a stand-alone application, WordCruncher serves as an interface to several LETRS databases, including the German databases.
TACT is the most ambitious system, organizing 15 separate programs, each program performing a unique task, under one shell. The user may access each of the 15 programs from the main screen. TACT can perform more tasks than WC, such as creating dictionaries, collecting collocates, and computing various statistics. WC supports only one type of coding, three-level reference coding; TACT supports several coding schemes. TACT allows one to define the search parameters in various ways through query files. The search results can be displayed in many ways. Mainly concerned with the linguistic aspects of texts, TACT is the most powerful tool for experimental linguistic and literary analysis. Still under development, TACT may contain some bugs, and its potential uses still need to be explored.
Conc is a concordance program under development for Macintosh computers. Like OCP, Conc does not create textbases in the way MakeBase in TACT or WCIndex in WC does. When running Conc, one makes concordances directly from original texts. A distinctive feature of Conc is that it displays the original text in one window, the one-line concordance in another, and the index in a third window, and that it allows one by clicking a word in one window to locate the corresponding position in other windows. Not primarily a retrieval engine, Conc does not support any kind of modification to a document.