Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 405.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2026-04-08 07:18:53+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: concordancing

Some here will have been around for sufficient time to remember, and
perhaps tp feel, the passion for concordance-generating software and the
analytic tools that were attached to it in growing numbers and
sophistication. For them I offer Ian Hamilton's "I Love Concordancing",
London Review of Books 18.16 (22 August 1996)--or, rather, a snippet
from its beginning. To those who don't like to feel such things, or
remember them and can, I can only say, you're missing out. Here goes:

> What was T.S. Eliot’s favourite colour? Which season – summer,
> autumn, winter, spring – would you expect to feature most often in
> the works of Philip Larkin? And which of these two poets would you
> reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to
> hyphens, keen on using the word mother?
>
> Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent
> browsing in the realms of the Concordance. It so happens that both
> Larkin and Eliot have lately had their works ‘concorded’ – that’s
> to say, worked over with a scanner in order that the world might
> know how many and which words each of them used, how often, when and
> where. Don’t ask me why. A concordance is, I think, meant to assist
> us in the checking of quotations, the remembering of half-forgotten
> lines. In my hands, it becomes a kind of toy.
>
> But then, I love such toys.
[...]

Yes, I know: much serious practical and theoretical work has resulted 
from or been affected by concordancing-become-textanalysis, but is not 
the ludic element in our work both reward and clue?

Best,
WM

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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