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AntConc

Brief description

AntConc is a basic text analysis program that can be used to examine where and how words occur in texts. With AntConc you can create frequency lists and concordances, which can be sorted in various ways and can also link directly to the full text. In addition, the program features a plot function (which graphically indicates where a particular word occurs in a text), as well the ability to produce overviews of Word clusters, n-grams and collocations.

Manual and tutorials

On the AntConc Homepage, a brief manual can be found (through the [Help] link), as well as a number of video tutorials and a written tutorial.

Tutorial AntConc 3.4
Introductiepracticum AntConc  
These tutorials (from the Faculty of Humanities of VU University) can be used to get familiar with the basic functions of the program. Before starting this tutorial, please download the practice file Alice11.txt first (right mouse button > Save as).

Corpus Analysis with Antconc
Tutorial from the website The Programming Historian, introducing the basic features of AntConc.

Availability

AntConc is freeware. It is available on VU PCs for students and staff of the Faculty of Humanities and can be downloaded at http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc for home use. It is available for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux.

Further remarks

AntConc can only be used to browse texts saved in so-called plain ASCII format. Most text corpora available on the faculty network are in this format. HTML and XML files are also saved in this format. Word and pdf files must first be converted to this format before they can be searched with AntConc (Word: File > Save > Save as > Save as: Plain text (*.txt))

AntConc is a good alternative to the commercial program WordSmith, which is used for similar tasks in the faculty. Its features are a little more limited than those of WordSmith. WordSmith offers more specific possibilities for:

• manipulating the concordance overview (adding and removing columns; increasing context; limiting context to sentences; deleting correlation rules; grouping correlation rules);
• sorting the concordance;
• saving the concordance in a file;
• working with XML annotation.

However, AntConc is in a state of constant development.