Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 407.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org


    [1]    From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.405: concordancing (100)

    [2]    From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
           Subject: concordancing (24)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2026-04-09 14:37:12+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.405: concordancing

A bit more on concordances - while the started as manually produced works,
probably in monasteries, at one point computers came into play
https://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/?a=d&d=CDS19600215-01.2.28&e=-------en-20--1--
txt-txIN-------
While Professor Parrish was my freshman English instructor, it was only
decades later that I learned about his work.

I gave a lecture to a couple of Paul Fyfe's English classes on concordances
- and below is the computer program I used and demonstrated:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my ($linein, @linewords, $word, %conwords, $count );

while ($linein = <>) { # read each line until there are no more

chomp $linein; # remove line ending symbol

$linein =~ s/[.,;:"]//g; # remove punctuation

$linein =~ s/ +/ /g; # multiple blanks spaces -> only one

$linein = lc $linein; # translate to all lower case

@linewords = split (/ /, $linein); #split line into words

foreach $word (@linewords) { #for each word in the line

$conwords{$word}++; #store/increment

}

}

while (($word, $count) = each (%conwords)) {

print “$word appears $count times\n"; # printout format

}
--henry


On Thu, Apr 9, 2026 at 3:30 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 405.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         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


--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2026-04-10 07:10:08+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: concordancing

Three sources for more on concordancing:

Lancashire, Ian. "Concordance Programs for Literary Analysis", Outlook
(SIGCUE), Spring/Summer 1986.

Lancashire, Ian. "23.2 Concordance Systems". The Humanities Computing 
Yearbook 1989-90:A Comprehensive Guide to Software and other Resources. 
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 485-89 and passim.

McCarty, Willard. "Handmade, Computer-assisted and Electronic
Concordances of Chaucer", in Computer-Based Chaucer Studies. CCH Working
Papers 3. Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities. pp. 49-65.

Some historical information is here to be gleaned. From the last,
see "A brief history of concordancing", pp. 51-53, which begins with
studies of Late Antiquity. Many references.

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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